HOWTO restore old qubes-backup in Q4.0-rc3 using qvm-backup-restore?

[Josefa Hays]

Hi mailinglist,

(I know many developers are busy building 4.0, so I won't quarrel about
the missing GUI - I just wanna restore my backups :-) )

I recently installed Q4.0-rc3. I have an old qubes-backup (from 2016) on
a LUKS encrypted external HDD. How do I restore my backup in 4.0 using
qvm-backup-restore? I guess I don't want to mount the drive directly in
Dom0, so, how do I do? Create a designated "backup-vm" and then exactly
how do I proceed?

What would be the step-by-step guide for restoring an old qubes-backup
using the commandline interface? Until the backup-GUI gets up and
running in 4.0 I guess many users will have the same question.

Best regards,
Josefa

[awokd]

On Fri, December 22, 2017 6:12 pm, Josefa Hays wrote:


> I recently installed Q4.0-rc3. I have an old qubes-backup (from 2016) on
> a LUKS encrypted external HDD. How do I restore my backup in 4.0 using
> qvm-backup-restore? I guess I don't want to mount the drive directly in
> Dom0, so, how do I do? Create a designated "backup-vm" and then exactly
> how do I proceed?
>
> What would be the step-by-step guide for restoring an old qubes-backup
> using the commandline interface? Until the backup-GUI gets up and running
> in 4.0 I guess many users will have the same question.

Attach external drive to sys-usb
"qvm-block" to list partitions
"qvm-block a backup-vm sys-usb:sda1" (whichever is your LUKS partition)
mount and unlock inside backup-vm
"qvm-backup-restore -d backup-vm /path/to/backupfileinbackupvm oldvm1
oldvm2 oldvm3" to selectively restore certain vms
unmount inside backup-vm
"qvm-block d backup-vm sys-usb:sda1"
Detach drive

[cooloutac]

oh man.... are they planning to implement a gui option?

[Kushal Das]

Does this mean USB3 based storage devices started working in 4.0?

No update in the following bug on the same.

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/3351

Kushal
--
Staff, Freedom of the Press Foundation
CPython Core Developer
Director, Python Software Foundation
https://kushaldas.in

[cooloutac]

seems marmarek posted an update, he suggest to update the fedora.

But it seems passthrough for usb3 is still not supported yet, only block device.

I'm glad for these posts before I attempted to try 4.0 and restore my old backups. I think I might wait a while.

[Kushal Das]

On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 10:31 PM, cooloutac <raah...@gmail.com> wrote:

> seems marmarek posted an update, he suggest to update the fedora.
>
> But it seems passthrough for usb3 is still not supported yet, only block device.
>
> I'm glad for these posts before I attempted to try 4.0 and restore my old backups. I think I might wait a while.
>

It seems I missunderstood the comment from marmarek. I just now updated the
Fedora 26 template as suggested and I can attach and mount external
USB3 storage device.

[cooloutac]

nice! so umm awokd. you wouldn't happen to have instructions to do this in paranoid mode do ya? grateful in advance. Tks for your posts man.

[cooloutac]

or woman, force of habit slang.

[awokd]

On Fri, December 29, 2017 7:53 pm, cooloutac wrote:
> or woman, force of habit slang.

Don't worry about it, I don't get triggered about that.

I don't think there's a user friendly way to do it yet in 4.0. See
https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic/qubes-users/aM_0sFesbbk/discussion#!topic/qubes-users/aM_0sFesbbk/discussion.

[cooloutac]

Saw that thread but i was confused. Guess I'll wait a bit.