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Desktop: document how to backup/restore the whole VM

Open thaJeztah opened this issue 7 months ago • 1 comments

Is this a docs issue?

  • [x] My issue is about the documentation content or website

Type of issue

Information is incorrect

Description

The guide currently describes how to backup content, but for some use-cases it may be useful to also describe how to backup (and restore) the Docker Desktop VM as a whole;

  • Describe the location of the VM disk on each platform
  • Describe steps to back-up the VM (on macOS this can also mention "include VM in time machine backups")
  • Backing up the VM may require docker desktop to be stopped while making the backup
  • On Windows with WSL 2, this can mention how to backup the drive for the distribution;
Backup WSL Linux distributions:
		If you are using any WSL2 linux distributions, back them up and restore later following the instructions here:
			https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/faq#how-can-i-back-up-my-wsl-distributions-
	
Backup Docker containers/images:
		Backup docker_data.vhdx file. Default location is %LOCALAPPDATA%/Docker/wsl/disk/docker_data.vhdx. Later restore it to the same location if needed.

Location

https://docs.docker.com/desktop/settings-and-maintenance/backup-and-restore/

Suggestion

No response

thaJeztah avatar Jun 02 '25 09:06 thaJeztah

Instructions for each platform can be found here: https://docker.atlassian.net/browse/DDB-243?focusedCommentId=436210

karman-docker avatar Jun 02 '25 11:06 karman-docker