Upgrading from R3.2 - R4.0.1 or 4.0.2-rc1?

[Gaijin]

I have a worstation on R3.2 and was holding out on an update to R4.x. I
was hoping that R4.0.2 would have been finalized by now, but news on
that has been pretty scarce since the July 10 announcement of RC1. I
can't afford a lot of time to troubleshoot an upgrade on this particular
machine.

If I were to upgrade, is it safer to proceed with R4.0.1 and then to
manually upgrade the VMs, or is 4.0.2-RC1 stable enough?

[awokd]

Gaijin:

The most time consuming part of an upgrade is the backup & restore. A
suggested upgrade procedure could be:

1) Create 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 install media
2) Backup all VMs
3) Pull OS drive, replace with new, disconnect any secondary drives or
also replace with new
4) Attempt to install new OS- try 4.0.2 first. If problems, 4.0.1.
5) Try test restore of VM to OS drive
6) Reconnect secondary drives and restore all VMs

Note you need twice the free space on your OS drive of the largest VM in
your system for a restore.

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[Gaijin]

On 2019-10-20 18:43, 'awokd' via qubes-users wrote:
> Gaijin:
>> I have a workstation on R3.2 and was holding out on an update to R4.x. I

>> was hoping that R4.0.2 would have been finalized by now, but news on
>> that has been pretty scarce since the July 10 announcement of RC1. I
>> can't afford a lot of time to troubleshoot an upgrade on this particular
>> machine.
>>
>> If I were to upgrade, is it safer to proceed with R4.0.1 and then to
>> manually upgrade the VMs, or is 4.0.2-RC1 stable enough?
>>
> The most time consuming part of an upgrade is the backup & restore. A
> suggested upgrade procedure could be:
>
> 1) Create 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 install media
> 2) Backup all VMs
> 3) Pull OS drive, replace with new, disconnect any secondary drives or
> also replace with new
> 4) Attempt to install new OS- try 4.0.2 first. If problems, 4.0.1.
> 5) Try test restore of VM to OS drive
> 6) Reconnect secondary drives and restore all VMs
>
> Note you need twice the free space on your OS drive of the largest VM in
> your system for a restore.

Thanks for the advice awokd. I was able to get R4.0.2-RC1 installed.

I worked around the Debian template update issue by using 'apt update'
manually in the terminal. The default installed Fedora, Whonix and
Debian templates seem to update from Qubes Manager normally.

I've had issues after restoring my backups though. I can't seem to
upgrade my TemplateVMs without getting the dreaded “Failed to
synchronize cache for repo” errors
https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#i-keep-getting-failed-to-synchronize-cache-for-repo-errors-when-trying-to-update-my-fedora-templates
Switching the NetVM for the templates between sys-whonix, sys-firewall
and sys-net hasn't resolved the error. I guess that is a Fedora issue
rather than Qubes though.

[awokd]

Gaijin:

> I've had issues after restoring my backups though. I can't seem to
> upgrade my TemplateVMs without getting the dreaded “Failed to
> synchronize cache for repo” errors
> https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#i-keep-getting-failed-to-synchronize-cache-for-repo-errors-when-trying-to-update-my-fedora-templates
> Switching the NetVM for the templates between sys-whonix, sys-firewall
> and sys-net hasn't resolved the error. I guess that is a Fedora issue
> rather than Qubes though.
>

Forgot about that gotcha. Check
https://github.com/Qubes-Community/Contents/blob/master/docs/system/restore-3.2.md.