Backup & Restore Nautobot with Snapshots

A Snapshot is a backup of the database associated to the Instance it's created from. It shows the data's state at the time the Snapshot was created. A Snapshot can be restored to any compatible Instance at a later date.

Create a Snapshot

There are two ways to create a Snapshot:

1. Take a Snapshot of a cloud instance. This is useful for regular backups of your Nautobot Cloud instances.
2. Upload an existing snapshot of a local instance. This is useful when migrating from a local Nautobot deployment to Nautobot Cloud.

These methods are described in detail below.

Method 1: Take a Snapshot of a cloud instance

To take a Snapshot of a cloud instance, navigate to the Snapshots section in the left-hand menu. This will bring you to the list of existing Snapshots, if any.

Click the Create button at the top right corner of the page. This will bring up a dialog to create a new Snapshot of an instance.

Fields:

Field	Required	Description
Instance (required):	Yes	The Instance from which a snapshot will be created.
Name (required):	Yes	A human-readable name for the Snapshot.

Click Create to take the Snapshot. The process may take a while depending on the size of the database.

Method 2: Upload an existing snapshot of a local instance

To take a Snapshot of a cloud instance, navigate to the Snapshots section in the left-hand menu. This will bring you to the list of existing Snapshots, if any.

Click the Upload button next to the Create button at the top right corner of the page. This will bring up a dialog to upload an existing Snapshot file.

Fields:

Field	Required	Description
Instance (required):	Yes	The Instance the uploaded Snapshot will be associated with. Snapshot restores are not performed automatically upon upload but they are to be used at any point in the future. To restore a Snapshot to an Instance, please use the Restore action. It can be found under the ellipsis (...) menu in the list of Snapshots.
Name (required):	Yes	A human-readable name for the uploaded Snapshot.
Snapshot file (required):	Yes	A TAR (.tar) file of the database snapshot.
Secret Key	No	Nautobot uses a secret key to hash certain entries in the database. You can find this in your nautobot_config.py file, the NAUTOBOT_SECRET_KEY environment variable, or from the nautobot-server nbshell command and performing: >>> from django.conf import settings >>> settings.SECRET_KEY 'a-r@nd0m-B1G-str1ng' This key is needed to successfully restore the database.

Click Upload to upload the Snapshot file. The process may take a while depending on the size of the database.