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QubesOS
Empty applications list when restoring appvms from backup
Qubes OS release
4.1
Brief summary
backup appvms from qubes 4.0 in order to migrate to 4.1 using qubes backup method (from qubes manager)
then restore the backup from qubes manager in 4.1
Expected behavior
original applications icons should be available
Actual behavior
Applications list in qube applications is empty
Workaround
Press on Refresh applications button
^ This is not a proper solution, Any user who is rebacking his appvms and see empty Applications/VM from qubes manager he will think the backup is corrupted and its just empty appvm while the truth is that the icons are just hidden. (make automatic one refresh to the vm applications once vm is restored, or whatever better solution available)
I just ran into this too. I agree that the "refresh applications" button is not a proper solution in the restoring-from-backup scenario. Each time that button is pressed, it requires starting both that qube and its template, grabbing the app list, then shutting them down. This takes maybe a couple of minutes, depending on hardware. This means that a user who is restoring, say, 50 qubes from a backup, would have to click through the menus, click the button, wait, click through the menus, click the button, wait, etc. 50 times. Even if it only takes two minutes per qube, this is still 100 minutes where the user has to sit there clicking, clicking, waiting, clicking, clicking, waiting, and so on. This is pretty bad UX. The backup restoration process should do this automatically (where possible) when restoring qubes, and there should be a way to call this for all qubes so that the user can at least go AFK during the process. The current solution works when you only have to do it once and a while on one qube at a time, but a "bulk operation" solution is badly needed. If there's a command-line solution, I wasn't able to figure it out by reading the --help text and messing around with qvm-appmenus, qvm-sync-appmenus, etc.
Also, I'm pretty sure this behavior is a regression from previous Qubes releases, because I don't remember ever having all empty application lists after restoring from a backup before.
Ok, apparently it's not all of them, but I can't figure out why some qubes have populated lists while others don't. Seems random so far.
One difference is that dom0 home directories are no longer restored by default. @marmarek: could this be the problem? Could the desktop files be stored in a safe-to-restore format in the backup?
On 7/20/22 10:14, Demi Marie Obenour wrote:
Could the desktop files be stored in a safe-to-restore format in the backup?
They are in ~/.local/share/applications and one can simply copy them back along with ~./config from the restore folder. Best when XFXE is not running.
Don't know about "safe". If one has doubts about that I suppose the GUI method of recreating them is still faster then manually reviewing them all.
The format and file naming changed a bit compared to R4.0. All the code should handle conversion in place (for in-place upgrade), but re-generating them from scratch is a cleaner approach.
You can regenerate all by calling qvm-appmenus --all --update.
That said, indeed restoring a backup should do that automatically.
In my case, only some qubes had empty lists, while most had completely full lists (i.e., all possible apps added, not just the ones I had before the backup). I don't think any had the same list as when they were backed up. This might be because I was updating and trying out different commands to fix it during this whole process.
