Manage Cisco Crosswork Backup and Restore
Cisco Crosswork's backup and restore features help prevent data loss and preserve your installed applications and settings.
Crosswork offers multiple ways to perform a backup:
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Backup: Preserves the Crosswork configuration
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Data Backup: Preserves the data only. Application binaries are not backed up.
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Backup with NSO: Preserves NSO data along with the Crosswork configuration.
The process for the first and second options (Backup and Data Backup) are mostly similar and is explained in this topic. The third option (Backup with NSO) is explained in detail in Backup Cisco Crosswork with Cisco NSO.
Attention |
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When you create backups for a Cisco Crosswork cluster, or restore a cluster from a backup, follow these guidelines:
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Crosswork backup process depends on having SCP access to a server with sufficient amount of storage space. The storage required each backup will vary based on the your cluster size, applications in the cluster, and the scale requirements.
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During your first login, configure a destination SCP server to store backup files. This configuration is a one-time activity. You can't take a backup or initiate a restore operation until you complete this task.
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We recommend that you perform backup or restore operations during a scheduled maintenance window only. Users shouldn’t attempt to access Cisco Crosswork while these operations are running. Backups will take the system offline for about 10 minutes, but restore operations can be lengthy. Both will pause other applications until they are complete. These pauses can affect data-collection jobs.
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When performing a normal restore, Cisco Crosswork applications and data are restored to the same version as when you took the backup. When performing a disaster restore, you must use the same Cisco Crosswork software image that you used when creating the backup. You can’t perform a disaster restore using a backup created using a different version of the software.
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Use the dashboard to monitor the progress of the backup or restore process, until the process completes. If you attempt to use the Cisco Crosswork system during the process, you may see incorrect content or errors, since various services pause and restart frequently.
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You can run only one backup or restore operation at a given time.
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Both the Cisco Crosswork cluster and the SCP server must be in the same IP environment. For example: If Cisco Crosswork is communicating over IPv6, so must the backup server.
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To save space on your backup server, you may delete older backups, but they will still appear in the job list in this version.
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Operators that make more changes should back up more often (possibly daily) while others might be comfortable with doing a backup once a week or before major system upgrades.
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By default, Crosswork will not allow you to make a backup of a system that it does not consider as healthy. However, there are provisions to override this protection to facilitate the sharing of an image with Cisco for additional analysis or other troubleshooting efforts.
Before you begin
Before you begin, ensure that you have:
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The hostname or IP address and the port number of the secure SCP server. Ensure that the server has sufficient storage available.
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A file path on the SCP server, to use as the destination for your backup files.
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User credentials for an account with file read and write permissions to the remote path on the destination SCP server.
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If you are making a data backup, note down the build version of the installed applications. Before performing the data restore, you must install the exact versions of those applications. Any mismatch in the build versions of the applications can result in data loss and failure of the data restore job.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Configure an SCP backup server:
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Step 2 |
Create a backup: |
Step 3 |
To restore from a backup file: |