Please feel free to remove this if it is further from the topic of Qubes-Whonix than it is of any use to new users of said combination.
If you backup a customised anon-whonix clone AppVM, and write the file on a removable medium, it seems by initial observations that you can restore that backup from the USB device to another installation of Qubes (3.2 tested) and not have to redo the customisation all over again.
This seems quite unsurprising for a typical Linux operation, but please reply if there maybe any security matters I have not considered, because I am yet to consider any at all.
I read that on the first day I joined. Probably best to get the moderator to extinguish this one then I’d say. Sorry I have wasted your time with crap.
No worries, It takes a little time to get accustomed to the Forum Guidelines, Free Support Principal, Best Practices etc…I will admit Ive done the same thing a time or two (or four) so don’t stew over it.
Also I hope this won’t deter you from seeking help on the forum if you need it. The Whonix wiki Support Page is pretty verbose on what resource to use when you have a specific issue (i.e.Qubes vs Debian issue… Whonix or Qubes issue etc.) but it does not cover every scenario. So if you have doubt weather its a Whonix issue or not you can roll the dice and ask on the forum.
Probably best to get the moderator to extinguish this one then I’d say.
You can delete your own posts if you wish . Hit the edit pencil (next to Reply) on the lower right hand corner of your post and delete your text.
Just an update for anyone new to Qubes-Whonix who would like to preserve all the different sets of bookmarks etc. that they have painstakingly implanted into various custom AppVMs of their own design … once.
The AppVMs that I originally created on a system installed on the internal HDD can be backed up and restored onto a new system on an external USB drive, and as I discovered yesterday, they even work on a USB stick too.
It seems that the virtual machines created in Qubes are independent of the hardware from what I can gather. Sometimes, some of them seem to take a long time to shutdown, and after 2x20 seconds I have been inclined to kill them, but I am about 66% sure that it is because they are large VMs with a lot of applications installed. I wish I could go back and test how fast they shutdown on hardware with an internal HDD, but now that I have Qubes and Whonix running fine on both the external HDD and the USB stick, I have restored the internal HDD OS to a plain and simple Linux distro with nothing on it, (the SSD is almost 2 years old now so I don’t trust it anyway).
In essence, the several AppVMs I created last week on the laptop have been backed up and then restored multiple times to the external HDD (USB) and also to a 64GB USB stick and work just fine. No need to reconfigure all your preferred AppVMs every time you reinstall Qubes, which would also apply to Qubes-Whonix.
I hope that this can save others some time in experimenting with Qubes-Whonix because it is not necessary, as far as I have found, to recreate the same AppVMs over and over again each time you try a new installation.