Restoring Qubes Without Backup

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You don’t need to decrypt qubes_dom0-vm–personal–private as it’s already decrypted.
These qubes_dom0-vm-* are your VMs storage and you need to copy them.
Here is an example of how to restore your ‘personal’ VM on new Qubes:

  1. Copy VM storage from old Qubes:
    dd if=/dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-vm–personal–private of=/path/to/where/you/want/to/store/this/backup/qubes_dom0-vm–personal–private.img bs=1M status=progress
  2. Boot your new Qubes and create AppVM with name ‘personal’ (the old AppVM settings won’t be restored so you need to enter them manually in Qubes Settings if needed). Start this AppVM so it’ll create empty storage. Then shutdown this AppVM.
  3. in dom0 restore old AppVM image over empty new AppVM storage:
    dd if=/path/to/where/you/want/to/store/this/backup/qubes_dom0-vm–personal–private.img of=/dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-vm–personal–private bs=1M status=progress
  4. Done, your ‘personal’ AppVM is restored.

The same goes for your HVMs but for HVMs you’ll need to copy qubes_dom0-vm--*–root and qubes_dom0-vm–*–private storage if you used both of them in your HVM.

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