Tips for 4.2 stragglers: what to back up in dom0 before upgrading to 4.3

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The Qubes Backup application will save a copy of your $HOME if you select dom0 for backup, but there are other things in dom0 you might also want to separately preserve for later reference and post-upgrade configuration.

Some likely paths:

/etc/cron*
/etc/default/grub/
/etc/environment
/etc/grub.d/
/etc/libvirt/hooks
/etc/lvm/lvm.conf
/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/
/etc/qubes-rpc/
/etc/qubes/backup/
/etc/qubes/policy.d/
/etc/qubes/qmemman.conf
/etc/qubes/repo-templates/qubes-templates.repo
/etc/sysctl.d/
/etc/yum.repos.d/qubes-dom0.repo
/etc/X11/Xresources
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/
/root/
/srv/
/usr/share/qubes/templates/libvirt/xen.xml

Tool outputs:

crontab -l
dnf list --installed
qubes-prefs
qvm-features dom0
qvm-prefs dom0
qvm-service dom0
qvm-ls --tree --format disk
qvm-ls --tree --format full
qvm-ls --tree --format kernel
qvm-ls --tree --format network
qvm-ls --tree --format prefs
qvm-ls --tree --format simple

Possibly also helpful:

  • Screenshots of each tab of Qubes Global Config
  • Screenshots of XFCE System Settings windows that are important to you. The backup tool will also preserve these in XML form (~/home-restore-<datestamp>/dom0-home/<user>/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/*)

Anything else?

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Yes:
/etc/libvirt/hooks [ if you use hooks for affinity or any other “per-qube” actions ]

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Would suggest to backup all in an easy way:

  • Start your device from a TailsOS stick and boot into Tails (or any other bootable OS (with needed Gnome Disks tool)
  • Network connection isn’t needed
  • go Accesoires > Disks
  • make a image of your complete QubesOS drive to a bigger USB Harddrive (5GB/10GB or whatever)
  • shutdown
  • start QubesOS again
  • do the update
  • if you run into problems
  • boot up TailsOS again
  • go Disks and replace the existing QubesOS harddrive with the formerly saved image
  • shutdown and boot up the old QubesOS again

I’m doing so as long as I find the errors/problems, when Qubes in-place-upgrade isn’t successfully running through the enire process

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