Milestone recommends that you make regular backups of your system configuration as a disaster recovery measure. While it is rare to lose your configuration, it can happen under unfortunate circumstances. It is important that you protect your backups, either through technical or organizational measures.
Backing up your system configuration can take a significant amount of time, however, your system will stay online during backup. The backup duration may depend on:
- Your system configuration
- Your hardware
- Whether you have installed the SQL Server, Event Server component, and the Management Server component on a single server or several servers
All relevant system configuration files are combined into one single .cnf file that is saved at a specified location. During the backup, all backup files are first exported to a temporary system backup folder on the management server. You can select another temporary folder by right-clicking the notification area's Management Server service icon and by selecting Select shared backup folder.
System backup password
You can choose to protect the overall system configuration by assigning a system configuration password. After you assign a system configuration password, backups are protected by this password. The password settings are stored on the computer that is running the management server in a secure folder. You will need this password to:
- Restore the configuration from a configuration backup that was created with password settings different than the current password settings
- Moving or installing the management server on another computer due to a hardware failure (recovery)
- Configure an additional management server in a system with clustering
Scheduled backups
For large systems, Milestone recommends that you define scheduled backups. The management server stores your system's configuration in an SQL database. Milestone recommends that you regularly make scheduled backups of this SQL database as a disaster recovery measure. While it is rare to lose your system configuration, it can happen under unfortunate circumstances. Backups also have the added benefit that they flush your SQL database's transaction log.
Microsoft® SQL Server Management Studio, a tool downloadable for free from their website ( https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/), is required for performing scheduled backup and restore. In addition to managing SQL Servers and their databases, the tool includes some easy-to-use backup and restoration features. Download and install the tool on your management server.
Manual backups
If you have a smaller setup and do not need scheduled backups, you can back up your system configuration manually. The following steps describe how to back up a system configuration manually:
- From the menu bar, select .
- Read the note in the dialog box and click Backup.
- Enter a file name for the .cnf file.
- Enter a folder destination and click Save.
- Wait until the backup is finished and click Close.