Which settings and data are included Management Center's Backup

Products

• Management Center
• MC-S400-20
• Management Center - VA

Issue/Introduction

You want to know which settings and data are included Management Center's Backup

Environment

Management Center 3.x or 2.x

Resolution

Included:  all data stored in the database such as:

- Manage Device configured 
- Manage Device backups (if exist) 
- Policies, shared objects and scripts (along with historical versions)
- Jobs
- Administration System Settings
- Users, Groups and Roles
- Audit logs, Alerts 

Note: Encrypted information such as manage device password/enable password, secret or password for local and external authentication are kept encrypted 

Optional on Backups
         - Statistics Monitoring/PDM data from Manage Devices   

Not included:

- Files in the Management Center file store (but the directories and directory structures will be part of backup)
- MC default certificate (private and public)
- System Logs  
- License / Birth Certificate
- Management Center (admin) password and enable password 
- Management Center Images (installed-system view) 
- Network configuration (IP, mask, default gateway)

Additional Information

Management Center (MC) backups can only be restored to same or another MC running same version where backup was taken from.
Backups taken from MC hardware device can be restored to MC-VA (and vice versa). 
MC resources such as CPU, memory and disks that will be used to restore a backup should be equal or higher than MC where backup is created.
Before restoring backup, make sure MC appliance has the same data disk space allocation or higher. Otherwise, policy/shared objects might be missed after backup restore.
Use MC cli command "storage view" to see data disk size. Alternatively, check the resource allocation from the virtualization platform.
Offload MC backup either by transferring to one of your internal server (scp, ftp, sftp) or by downloading  to your PC (only available in 3.2.x and above).
MC supports 1GB backup file upload via GUI. If backup file takes more than 1 GB space, use cli command backup import to import backup from FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, and SCP servers.
With an exception of installed MC images  (installed-system view),  MC Restore Factory Default (RFD) would delete everything including MC backup stored in  MC itself,