Questions about Upgrading 33 to 34

I have a question before I attempt to upgrade my Fedora 33 installation to Fedora 34. I have a pretty important/delicate application that I use and I need to make sure I will be able to use it after the upgrade. I have Windows 10 installed in Boxes, and I use Quicken in the Windows 10 VM. After I upgrade to F34, will my Windows 10/Quicken VM still work or will I lose it and need to reinstall? I regularly back up the Quicken data but the thought of reinstalling Windows 10 (and all of the updates) and then reinstalling Quicken and restoring my data makes me cringe.

The upgrade should not affect the VM.

However, I wonder why you are stuck on quicken when gnu-cash does almost everything that quicken provides and is native to linux. The data can be interchanged as well.

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A couple of years ago I spent a considerable amount of time trying out both GnuCash and HomeBank.

This isn’t the first time I was asked why I don’t use GNUCash. I felt like I needed an accounting class to understand it. It was a non-starter for me. I just couldn’t figure out how to get it up and running. There’s too much on the screen that’s unrelated to my task at hand, which was to track a simple checking account. I had to hunt through lists of crap that I didn’t understand why it was there. It was just too complicated. I mean, even the startup wizard was made backwards, who puts the Next button to the left of the Back button? I had trouble getting through to the end because I kept pressing the back button when I wanted to go forward.

I actually used HomeBank for a couple months, but ultimately it was too rudimentary.

Quicken is the Goldilocks product. Not too complex, not too simple. It does a lot, is very good at what it does, and I don’t mind paying for that. I only wish they had a Linux version.

I don’t see any reason an upgrade would break a VM. However, if you are worried about it, you could back up the VM before you start the upgrade.

Generally speaking, I would recommend doing a backup before an upgrade in any situation. Or, more accurately, I would recommend doing regular backups all the time. :cowboy_hat_face:

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I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. Based on experience, no application was interrupted when I upgraded from 33 to 34. But it’s still best to do a backup first.

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Maybe a better question is; How do you back up (and restore) a Boxes VM?

The files should be in these three places

~/.config/gnome-boxes
~/.local/share/gnome-boxes
~/.config/libvirt

The disk image itself is in ~/.local/share/gnome-boxes so that will be large. The other 2 directories contain config files which are very small.

If you back those directories up somewhere, you should be able to restore them simply by replacing the files again. Realistically as long as you had the disk image, you could recreate the VM it but it is a lot easier if you also have the config files so I would grab everything.

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Unless you have saved snapshots. I have 4 or 5 saved snapshots and my .config/libvirt/storage folder contains 345GB.

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