Questions about wyng-util-qubes installation

User Support
1

First, I should say that I’m thrilled that wyng exists, I realistically rarely do backups with the official tool because it is so painful.

I’d like to install wyng-util-qubes and wyng-backups, but I’m not a very technical user, so I have a few questions.

  1. Requirements state wyng-backup v0.8beta4 or later. I’m assuming that the way to download a version is through the tags page? If this is correct, the most recent available is v0.8beta3.

  2. @tasket Will you be signing wyng-util-qubes in the same way that you did for wyng backups? Is there a second source of your GPG public key somewhere other than github?

  3. Upon a new release, is upgrading as simple as running these commands again once downloading the new versions and sending them to dom0?

Also, will there be backward compatibility of backups between the current versions and stable?

Fingers crossed the QubesOS team makes this the official tool…

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Thanks for pointing out the missing tag. The main branch has the beta4 version in it already, so it can be downloaded from there or the ‘08beta’ branch. wyng-util-qubes will tell you if you have an unsupported version of Wyng.

I started signing Wyng separately due to some gpg compatibility problems I was having with Github some months ago – I don’t know what their issue was; it just started working again. So I’m not sure if I will continue with the separate .gpg file. Of course, verification can be done with git. If this is a problem, let me know.

Since key servers are no longer a thing, I don’t know where else I’d put my public key (I do have a repo on Codeberg.org that hasn’t been updated in a while, but the key should be there as well). However, just knowing the key fingerprint through some other channel (such as here) is usually considered sufficient. On import of the key, you will be shown the fingerprint and can verify that it matches what you saw here: BEE2 20C5 356E 764A 73EB 4AB3 1DC4 D106 F07F 1886.

I can’t promise the install procedure won’t get more complicated, but that process has been the same since 2018. Keeping the Wyng and related code compact and simple to deploy is considered a feature, as it can be a real help when doing system recovery / restore.

Also note that the util’s Readme could use more work; it currently gives the impression you should use --pool with the backup command, but you should ignore it when backing up (and you can ignore it with restore as long as you don’t have special storage requirements).

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3

Sorry I forgot to answer your last question. Version compatibility is a top priority with Wyng. The archive format itself has seldom changed over the years, and in a way that future versions of the program can read older archives. There is no risk that current v0.8 betas will produce archives that can’t be used by the v0.8 full release.

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