It is recommended to perform periodic backups of your flexVDI Manager instance, and keep it in a safe place. By following this best practice, if you need to do a complete restore of all your environment, you won't need to define every logical object created on your infrastructure again. There are two tools that can help you doing a backup of the flexVDI Manager instance:

• flexVDI Config, for interactive backups,
• manager_backup, for command line or scripting.

Interactive backup with flexVDI Config

To perform an interactive backup, follow those steps:

1. Launch flexVDI Config running flexvdi-config command from the command line.
2. Select Manager from the menu
3. Select Backup.
4. Enter the password for your instance of flexVDI Manager. The default password is flexvdi.
   
   
5. Enter the path where the backup file will be stored.
   
   
6. Enter the name of the backup file.
   
7. The backup process will automatically start. You will be informed of the result of the operation, and the full path of the backup.

Backing up from the command line

This form of backup is ideal for integration into scripts, scheduled tasks or remote administration tools.

For a complete list of options supported by manager_backup, run it with the --help argument:

[root@flexdemo01 ~]# manager_backup --help
Usage: manager_backup -d BACKUP_DIR [options]
Options:
  -h, --help           show this help message and exit
  -d BACKUP_DIR        save backup on BACKUP_DIR
  -n BACKUP_NAME       use BACKUP_NAME as filename
  -w MANAGER_PASSWORD  password for this flexVDI Manager instance
  -f                   overwrite existing backup file
  -q                   supress output messages

The only mandatory argument is -d, which is used to identify the target directory for the backup. But we usually must also use -w to state the password for the flexVDI Manager instance. If you the -n argument is not used, a file name based on the current date of the system will be automatically generated for this backup.

Usage example

In the following example we'll launch the manager_backup locally from the installed Host, generate a backup copy in the /flexvdi/backup directory, and use the default password for the flexVDI Manager instance.

[root@flexdemo01 ~]# manager_backup -d /flexvdi/backup -w flexvdi
Creating a temporal directory...
Backing up MongoDB...
Copying network configuration...
Creating tarball...
Downloading backup...
Cleaning temporal directory...
Finishing...
A new backup has been stored on /flexvdi/backup/flexvdi_backup_021114_1016.tgz

Restoring a backup

To restore a backup, use flexVDI Config, follow these steps:

1. Select Manager from the main menu.
2. Select Restore.
3. Enter the password for your instance of flexVDI Manager. 
4. Select the path where the backup file is stored.
5. Select the backup file that you want to restore.
   
   
   
6. flexVDI Config will ask for confirmation before restoring the backup. This operation can not be undone.
7. Then a progress bar will appear informing about the restoration process, and in the end a message will indicate when the backup is restored.