NetBox Enterprise serves mission critical use cases across government, financial institutions, and enterprises spanning many industries. These organizations rely on NetBox in their operations and require robust disaster recovery mechanisms. Critical to any NetBox disaster recovery strategy is backup and restoration of the NetBox data along with the operational configuration of your NetBox deployment. NetBox Enterprise comes out of the box with powerful backup and recovery features that make it easy to confidently backup and restore your entire NetBox enterprise deployment in just a few simple steps. Let’s take a look!
How Backup and Recovery Work in NetBox Enterprise
NetBox Enterprise supports full application backup and recovery of your entire installation. This includes the data in NetBox of course, but also much more. NetBox Enterprise will back up and easily restore:
- The NetBox Enterprise Admin Console and related configuration
- The NetBox application and related configuration
- The built-in PostgreSQL, Redis, and S3 services
Every element of backup and restoration is consolidated into a single process, making recovery from disaster scenarios fast and easy. The only external requirement for NetBox Enterprise’s backup and restoration feature is access to any S3 compatible object store – enabling you to choose a storage technology meeting your exact requirements for placement, cost, security, and other factors.
Backups are configured right in the NetBox Enterprise Admin Console and can run on demand, or at a scheduled frequency: hourly, daily, weekly, or any frequency you require. In addition, the backup retention policy is configurable: keep backups for days, weeks, months, or even years as required to meet your policy and operational goals.
When it comes time to restore from a backup, NetBox Enterprise makes this super simple: all you need is a bare Linux host, the NetBox Enterprise installation package, and access details for the S3 storage holding backups. A full restoration from base OS to running NetBox enterprise installation typically takes less than 15 minutes.
Walkthrough: Backing Up NetBox Enterprise
Let’s take a hands-on look at backup management in NetBox Enterprise. When you log into the NetBox Enterprise Admin Console, you’ll see a few basics of your backups right on the dashboard.
Next, when you click into the Disaster Recovery tab, you’ll be able to easily manage your backup settings and scheduling, including configuring your storage destination and a backup schedule.
You can also easily review your backup history or kick off an on-demand backup of your NetBox Enterprise cluster.
And lastly, you can drill into the details of individual backups to review the manifest of NetBox Enterprise components included in the backup, the timing of each component’s backup snapshot, and logs related to the backup process.
Walkthrough: Restoring NetBox Enterprise
Uh oh – the world is ending! Our production NetBox Enterprise cluster has been taken offline by a stray backhoe! Let’s restore to a secondary location.
All we need to get back up and running is a fresh Linux host. First, we download and uncompress the NetBox Enterprise installation package:
Then, we initiate the restore process:
We need to provide S3 object store access information for our backup archive:
Next, we confirm that we want to restore from the detected backup:
If we’ve been running a multi-node NetBox Enterprise cluster, we can open the Admin Console to add additional nodes to our new cluster:
Lastly, we type “continue” to initiate the final restoration steps:
After a few minutes, we should see NetBox Enterprise marked “Ready” in the Admin Console:
Et voilà – we now have full access to NetBox Enterprise, including all our data up to the last time of backup:
Balance has returned to the force.
Implement NetBox Enterprise for Rock Solid Network Operations
NetBox Enterprise makes disaster recovery of your NetBox environment a cinch. If you need to deploy NetBox inside your own environment rather than transitioning to the fully hands-off NetBox Cloud experience, NetBox Enterprise is a great option that makes rock solid NetBox deployment and operations vastly easier so you can focus on what matters most: architecting and operating your network and infrastructure.
Want to try NetBox Enterprise? Contact us today!
