HP Insight Control Server Provisioning 7.3 Update 1 Administrator Guide

10 Backing up and restoring your appliance
Overview
Insight Control server provisioning provides services to back up and restore an appliance. If an
appliance is lost or corrupted, it might be necessary to restore the appliance from a backup.
A backup contains configuration settings and management data and is stored in a file of proprietary
format.
You can use the IC server provisioning UI to do backup and restore operations from the Settings
menu (see the online help for details).
In addition, REST APIs and sample scripts are provided to perform backup and restore operations.
Sample scripts are available on the Insight Control server provisioning media and in the product
download zip file.
The following sections provide information on backup and restore and some best practices as well
as descriptions of the backup and restore REST APIs.
• “Backing up the appliance” (page 45)
• “Restoring the appliance” (page 50)
CAUTION: Restoring a backup replaces all management data and most configuration settings
on the appliance. The appliance is not operational during a restore. It can take several hours to
perform a restore. A restore cannot be cancelled or undone once it has started. If a nonrecoverable
error occurs during a restore, you will have to download a new appliance template as described
in the HP Insight Control Server Provisioning Installation Guide, available at http://www.hp.com/
go/insightcontrol/docs. Restore should only be used to recover from catastrophic failures; it should
not be used for minor problems that can be resolved in other ways.
Backing up the appliance
About backing up the appliance
Insight Control server provisioning provides the ability to save your configuration settings and
management data to a backup file and enables you to use that backup to restore a corrupted
appliance in the event of a catastrophic failure.
The backup process involves creating a backup file and then downloading that file so that you can
store it to a safe and secure (off-appliance) location for future use.
For the procedure on creating a backup file from the UI, see the online help.
For advice on creating and archiving a backup file, see “Best practices for backing up an appliance”
(page 46).
IMPORTANT: In the unlikely event you need to restore the appliance, HP recommends backing
up your appliance configuration on a regular basis, preferably daily and, and especially:
The appliance stores one backup file at a time. Creating each subsequent backup file replaces the
current backup file. To prevent a backup file from being overwritten by a new backup file, download
and save the backup file to an off-appliance location before running the next backup process.
The backup file has the format:
appliance-host-name_backup_yyyy-mm-dd_hhmmss.bkp
For example, the backup file myhost_backup_2014–02–01_092700.bkp was created for the
appliance host name myhost on February 1, 2014 at 9:27 a.m.
Insight Control server provisioning provides a Backup administrator user role specifically for backing
up the appliance by permitting access to other resource views without permitting actions on those
Overview 45