Lesson Contents
Cisco IOS routers and switches are able to create ‘snapshots’ of their configuration using the archive feature. Cisco calls these snapshots ‘configuration archives’ and they are very useful as it allows you to store multiple versions of your configuration.
The configuration archive can be created every time you save your running configuration or you can create one based on a time schedule, for example, every 24 hours or so.
When you have multiple snapshots you can use a show command to see the difference between the configurations and easily restore (rollback) to a previous version.
Let’s take a look at the configuration, shall we?
Configuration
First, we need to configure where we want to store our configuration archives. When you use the path
command, you can see what options we have:
Router(config)#archive
Router(config-archive)#path ?
flash: Write archive on flash: file system
ftp: Write archive on ftp: file system
http: Write archive on http: file system
https: Write archive on https: file system
pram: Write archive on pram: file system
rcp: Write archive on rcp: file system
scp: Write archive on scp: file system
slot0: Write archive on slot0: file system
tftp: Write archive on tftp: file system
Normally an external location would be a good idea, but to keep things simple, I will use the flash memory of my router:
Router(config-archive)#path flash:router-backup
Each configuration archive file will start with “router-backup” in the filename. Besides the destination, we also have to choose when we want to create a configuration archive. For example, whenever the running-config is saved as the startup-config might be a good idea to create a backup:
Router(config-archive)#write-memory
I will also configure a schedule, for example, to create a configuration archive every 24 hours:
Router(config-archive)#time-period 1440
1440 minutes means we’ll create a snapshot every 24 hours. Everything is now in place. Let’s see if it is working.
Verification
We can use the show archive command to see how many snapshots we have. At the moment, no snapshots were made, so the list is empty:
Router#show archive
There are currently 1 archive configurations saved.
The next archive file will be named flash:router-backup-1
Archive # Name
0
1
2
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5
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13
14
Now we will save the running-config, and thanks to the write-memory command, it will also create a configuration archive:
Router#copy running-config startup-config
Destination filename [startup-config]?
Building configuration...
[OK]
Verifying checksum... OK (0xDCF1)
When we look again at the show archive
command we’ll see our first configuration archive:
Router#show archive
There are currently 2 archive configurations saved.
The next archive file will be named flash:router-backup-2
Archive # Name
0
1 flash:router-backup-1 <- Most Recent
2
3
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5
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As configured, you can see that it has been stored on the flash of the router:
Router#show flash:
System CompactFlash directory:
File Length Name/status
1 840 router-backup-1
[904 bytes used, 16776308 available, 16777212 total]
16384K bytes of ATA System CompactFlash (Read/Write)
Having extra backups feels great! Before we are going to recover one, I’ll show you how you can compare different archives. I’ll make some changes to the running-config so that we’ll end up with two different configuration archives:
Router(config)#interface loopback0
Router(config-if)#ip address 1.1.1.1 255.255.255.0
We’ll save the running-config to the startup-config so that another archive is created:
Router#copy running-config startup-config
Destination filename [startup-config]?
Building configuration...
[OK]
Verifying checksum... OK (0xDCF1)
Let’s find out if we have another snapshot:
Router#show archive
There are currently 3 archive configurations saved.
The next archive file will be named flash:router-backup-3
Archive # Name
0
1 flash:router-backup-1
2 flash:router-backup-2 <- Most Recent
3
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5
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So we now have two configuration archives but don’t know their differences. IOS tells us that the second one is the latest version, but this doesn’t always mean that it’s the best configuration that we have. Luckily there’s a command that tells us exactly the difference between the two files:
Thanks!!! Great job…
Nice LAB thanks !!
I think the topic for archive is good but you didnt say much about rollback. In this topic are missing such commands as
configure terminal revert timer and some others
Hi Tatyana,
I will add these extra commands, sounds like a good idea.
Rene
Hi,
I have the error
Cannot set maximum when backing up to network path"
when I try to set the maximum value of backups.
Can you help me?