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qubes-doc/common-tasks/backup-emergency-restore-v4.md
Andrew David Wong bb26173089
Update Emergency Backup Recovery - format version 4 
- Clarify language and fix typos
- Improve formatting
- Include example for bzip2 compression
- Wrap lines
  (This file is an exception to the normal line wrapping rule,
  since it is specifically intended to be read as plain text.)
2018-06-30 21:01:18 -05:00

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layout title permalink redirect_from
doc Emergency Backup Recovery - format version 4 /doc/backup-emergency-restore-v4/
/en/doc/backup-emergency-restore-v4/
/doc/BackupEmergencyRestoreV4/

Emergency Backup Recovery without Qubes - format version 4

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: The backup content is encrypted and integrity-protected with the scrypt utility. You will need a copy of this utility in order to access your data. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that you store a copy of this utility with your backups. If your distribution has scrypt packaged (e.g., Debian), you can install the package in the standard way using your distribution's package manager. Otherwise, you'll need to download a compiled binary or compile the program from source yourself. (Don't forget to verify signatures first!) Note that versions of scrypt up to 1.2.0 (inclusive) do not support the -P option for easier scripting, which means you'll need to enter the passphrase for each file separately, instead of using echo ... | scrypt.

Note: In the following example, the backup file is both encrypted and compressed.

  1. Untar the main backup file.

    [user@restore ~]$ tar -i -xvf qubes-backup-2015-06-05T123456
backup-header
backup-header.hmac
qubes.xml.000.enc
vm1/private.img.000.enc
vm1/private.img.001.enc
vm1/private.img.002.enc
vm1/icon.png.000.enc
vm1/firewall.xml.000.enc
vm1/whitelisted-appmenus.list.000.enc
dom0-home/dom0user.000.enc

    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/.

  2. Set the backup passhprase environment variable. While this isn't strictly required, it will be handy later and will avoid saving the passphrase in the shell's history.

    read backup_pass

  3. Verify the integrity of backup-header. For compatibility reasons, backup-header.hmac is an encrypted and integrity protected version of backup-header.

    [user@restore ~]$ set +H
[user@restore ~]$ echo "backup-header!$backup_pass" |\
    scrypt dec -P backup-header.hmac backup-header.verified && \
    diff -qs backup-header backup-header.verified
Files backup-header and backup-header.verified are identical

    Note: If this command fails, it may be that the backup was tampered with or is in a different format. In the latter case, look inside backup-header at the version field. If it contains a value other than version=4, go to the instructions for that format version:

  4. Read backup-header. You'll need some of this information later. The file will look similar to this:

    [user@restore ~]$ cat backup-header
version=4
encrypted=True
compressed=True
compression-filter=gzip
backup_id=20161020T123455-1234

  5. Verify the integrity of and decrypt the private.img file that houses your data.

    [user@restore ~]$ backup_id=20161020T123455-1234 # see backup-header above
[user@restore ~]$ for f_enc in vm1/private.img.???.enc; do \
    f_dec=${f_enc%.enc}; \
    echo "$backup_id!$f_dec!$backup_pass" | scrypt dec -P $f_enc $f_dec || break; \
    done

    Note: If this command fails, it is likely that the backup is corrupted or has been tampered with.

  6. 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). For example, if you used bzip2, then you should do this:

    [user@restore vm1]$ mv private.img.dec private.img.dec.bz2
[user@restore vm1]$ bunzip2 private.img.dec.bz2

  7. 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/
[user@restore vm1]$ cat /mnt/img/home/user/your_data.txt
This data has been successfully recovered!

  8. Success! If you wish to recover data from more than one VM in your backup, simply repeat steps 6--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:

    https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-doc.git