Cisco ACE XML OL-13877-01 - Manual (Page 3)

11-61
Cisco ACE XML Gateway Administration Guide
OL-13877-01
Chapter 11 Miscellaneous Administrative Tasks
Backing Up and Restoring the System
Backing Up and Restoring the System
Working policies are extremely valuable documents, often the result of many hours of planning and
configuration. They also contain important and sensitive information about your network. You should
treat them with the same care that you use with any other sensitive, mission-critical data, including
having a backup and disaster recovery plan.
There are two approaches to backing up a system:
• By archiving individual policies and storing them offline. This captures policy changes made in the
Manager interface, but excludes configuration settings made on the appliance directly.
• By backing up the state of the appliance with the backup command. This produces an archive file
that contains the system state of the appliance, including configuration settings, policy, log files, and
so on.
Most people will choose to do both, storing individual policies as needed, and maintaining a regular
schedule of system backups. Archiving individual policies can be accomplished from the ACE XML
Manager web console. (For instructions on doing so, see the chapter “Exporting a Policy to a File” in
the Cisco ACE XML Gateway User Guide.) This section describes how to back up the entire system.
To back up a system or restore an appliance based on a previously saved backup, use the backup
command on the appliance. The backup command is available on both Gateway systems and the
Manager.
When you run the command, it examines the files on the appliance for any differences to the original
state, excluding those that are runtime-process-oriented. This information is written to an archive file,
which you can move to an appropriate storage medium for backup or recovery purposes.
Backing Up a System
The backup utility makes it possible to restore a system to a previously captured state. It saves the state
of an appliance by recognizing changes that have been made to the system from its initial state and saving
those changes to an archive. When that backup is restored on an appliance, the system is restored to the
saved state.
Note Restoration from a backup file is intended to occur only on an ACE XML appliance with an empty
configuration. Restoration may not work on an appliance that is not in that state.
System features saved by the backup utility include the policy state, the system’s network configuration,
and log information—essentially, any file created or modified since system installation, including scripts
or data files.
There are some types of system changes or features that are not backed up by the backup/restore utility.
For instance, it does not incorporate information that is specifically runtime-oriented, such as active
process information. It also excludes certain types of system changes, such as software updates, hotfixes,
or certified extensions installed by RPM. (Note that SDK extensions you have created and installed
yourself are backed up.) You will need to restore these items separately, before using the backup and
restore process.
The result of the backup operation is an archive file that contains new or changed files. Note that if you
do not remove this archive file, it will be included in the next backup operation. It is therefore advised
that after saving the backup file to a storage medium you remove the original from the appliance
filesystem.