Perm. attached USB HDD for backups

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1

Hi,
Since the backup needs an appVM, I’m thinking about creating one (i.e: sys-backup based on debian.minimal) and attach an external USB HDD to it.

Is that a good idea, or even recommended, or useless?

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2

My way of doing it is I have a DispVM named backup and I’ve configured it to automatically decrypt and mount /dev/xvdi when it’s attached (so an external HDD). I’ve configured it using vm.config, I’m going to write a guide for that later.

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3

You may find this useful for achieving your goal: Qubes User Data - utilize `vm.config` to execute scripts at Qube launch, even in DispVMs

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4

Hi,
TY for the suggestion !
Using executing a script (sh scipt.sh) is something I can do,
writing one and then encoding one is … well, I’m not there yet :confused:

5

This script may help:

mkdir -p /mnt/backup && while [ ! -e /dev/xvdi ]; do sleep 1; done; echo "pass" | cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/xvdi backup && mount /dev/mapper/backup /mnt/backup
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6

Again, TY very much !
I’ll see if I understood it … when I will manage to reinstall Qubes, as I just “lost” my two main NVMe :confused:

7

Neither !

  • the -sys should be at the beginning, like sys-backup
  • the sys-usb-proxy take over all USBs (takes over from sys-usb)

Created simple backup-vm, and tried a first backup … but left the VM with standard 20GB size, so runt out of space (backup is 54GB) and now I can’t whipe it, the VM keeps saying it’s full, even after deleting it and re-creating it :frowning:
What have I done again …