CCNP TSHOOT Certification Guide: Cisco IOS Auto Archive Feature
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You might be accustomed to storing a backup copy of your router's Cisco IOS image on an external server for backup purposes. But what about maintaining a copy of your router's configuration?
You could copy your router's configuration in RAM (that is, the running-config) to a backup copy of the configuration stored in NVRAM (the startup-config), by using the following command:
copy running-config startup-config
But what if the router dies, or those configuration files become corrupted? It might be handy to have a copy of that configuration stored on an external server, such as an FTP server.
The screencast below demonstrates how you can use the following command to copy a router's startup-config to an external FTP server:
copy startup-config ftp://username:password@IP_address
Notice that this command requires you to enter username and password credentials for the FTP server. If you're going to back up like this on a fairly regular basis, you might want to hardcode those credentials into your configuration. This screencast shows you how to do that by using these commands:
ip ftp username username ip ftp password password
You can even automate backing up your startup-config every so often. Cisco calls this feature configuration replace and configuration rollback. This screencast demonstrates the following steps:
- Entering archive configuration mode (archive)
- Specifying how often the startup-config will be backed up to an FTP server (time-period minutes)
- Creating a backup every time you copy your router's running-config to the startup-config (write-memory)
Occasionally you may want to view your archived configurations. The screencast shows you how to work with the show archive command.
Finally, you'll learn how to restore an archived configuration to your router's running-config:
configure replace ftp://IP_address/filename
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These Cisco IOS tools, and many others, are topics included in Cisco's Troubleshooting and Maintaining Cisco IP Networks (TSHOOT) course, part of Cisco's current CCNP certification track.