This page describes how to perform an emergency restore of a backup created on Qubes R4.0 or later (which uses backup format version 4).
The Qubes backup system has been designed with emergency disaster recovery in mind. No special Qubes-specific tools are required to access data backed up by Qubes. In the event a Qubes system is unavailable, you can access your data on any GNU/Linux system with the following procedure.
**Note:** In the following example, the backup file is both *encrypted* and *compressed*.
1. Backup content is encrypted and integrity protected using [scrypt
utility](https://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html). You need to obtain it to
restore your data. If your distribution have it packaged (like on Debian),
install the package standard way, otherwise you need to compile it yourself
(verify its signature first!).
Versions up to 1.2.0 (inclusive) do not support `-P` option for easier
scripting - which means you'll need to enter the passphrase for each file
separately, instead of using `echo ... | scrypt`.
2. Untar the main backup file.
[user@restore ~]$ tar -i -xvf qubes-backup-2015-06-05T123456
**Note:** Each VM in the backup file has its path listed in `qubes.xml.000.enc` (search for the `backup-path` property). You can extract only the files necessary for your VM (vmX) with `tar -i -xvf qubes-backup-2015-06-05T123456 backup-header backup-header.hmac vmX/`.
3. Set backup passhprase environment variable. While this isn't strictly required, it will be handy later and will avoid saving the passphrase into shell history.
read backup_pass
4. Verify integrity of `backup-header`. For compatibility reasons `backup-header.hmac` is in fact is an encrypted *and integrity protected* version of `backup-header`.
**Note:** If the above fail, most likely your backup is corrupted, or been tampered with.
7. Decompress and untar the decrypted `private.img` file.
[user@restore ~]$ cat vm1/private.img.??? | gzip -d | tar -xv
vm1/private.img
**Note:** If your backup was compressed with a program other than `gzip`, you must substitute the correct compression program. This information is contained in the `backup-header` file (see step 3).
8. Mount the private.img file and access your data.
[user@restore vm1]$ sudo mkdir /mnt/img
[user@restore vm1]$ sudo mount -o loop vm1/private.img /mnt/img/
9. Success! If you wish to recover data from more than one VM in your backup, simply repeat steps 5--8 for each additional VM.
**Note:** You may wish to store a copy of these instructions with your Qubes backups in the event that you fail to recall the above procedure while this web page is inaccessible. All Qubes documentation, including this page, is available in plain text format in the following Git repository:
