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Backup and Restore CE

This document describes the backup & restore process for Private Cloud Director Community Edition (CE).

Community Edition is not for production workloads. Use it for labs, evaluation, and learning only.

Community Edition backup & restore process

Scope

This procedure backs up and restores the Community Edition management plane on the CE host.

It does not back up VM disks, external storage, or anything outside the CE host.

Before you begin

  • Run as a user with sudo access on the CE host.

  • Ensure /tmp has enough free space for the backup file.

  • Plan for downtime during restore. unconfigure-du stops the CE management plane.

The backup can include secrets (tokens, passwords, certificates). Store it securely and restrict file permissions.

The backup process for Community Edition is:

  • Create a backup using airctl backup. The resulting backup file will be saved in the /tmp directory on the CE host.

  • Save backup copies of the k3s.yaml and airctl-config.yaml configuration files as well.

  • Move the backup file, and copy the other files to another directory to prevent unintentional overwrite.

The restore process for Community Edition is:

  • airctl unconfigure-du will stop the Community Edition management plane, including all of its Kubernetes pods, but will leave the Kubernetes install in place.

  • airctl restore uses the backup file to rebuild & restore your Community Edition installation.

The full command list is outlined below:

1

Create a backup (saves to /tmp)

2

Create a backup directory, and move the backup file

3

Save a copy of k3s and airctl configuration files

4

(Recommended) Lock down backup permissions

5

Verify the backup files exist

6

Unconfigure the CE deployment unit

7

Restore the deployment unit from the backup

8

Verify the restore

Your deployment is healthy when regions show Ready and ready services match desired services.

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