Backups & export

The appliance snapshots its own state nightly. Getting a copy off the appliance is a two-command job — and the only way a backup helps you after a hardware failure.

What a snapshot contains

Every night at 03:00 (appliance time), and whenever you run backup now, the appliance writes a timestamped snapshot holding:

the complete database (both a restorable dump and plain SQL),
the service configuration and environment (tokens included),
the AAA credential-encryption keys — critical: database contents are unreadable without them,
the active web-server configuration, and a manifest with sizes and row counts.

The 14 most recent snapshots are kept on the appliance; older ones age out automatically.

Day-to-day commands

innovexus> backup status
nightly snapshots in /var/backups/innovexus (newest first, 14 kept):
  20260825_030001   64M
  20260824_030001   63M
  20260823_030001   63M
total: 812M

innovexus> backup now
Snapshotting the database and configuration (the application keeps running)...
…progress…

Exporting a snapshot off the appliance

Step 1 — stage the newest snapshot for download:

innovexus> backup export
This stages the newest snapshot in the firmware-transfer store so it
can be pulled over SCP. The archive contains the database and keys —
treat the downloaded file as a credential.
Export the newest backup now? [y/N] y
exported: appliance-backup-20260825_030001.tar.gz  (64M)
Pull it off the appliance with the firmware-transfer account:
  scp -O [email protected]:appliance-backup-20260825_030001.tar.gz .

Step 2 — pull it from any workstation, using the transfer account’s credentials (web UI → Settings → Transfer):

$ scp -O [email protected]:appliance-backup-20260825_030001.tar.gz .
appliance-backup-20260825_030001.tar.gz      100%   64MB  41.2MB/s   00:01

Why -O? The transfer account speaks classic SCP only (it serves network devices pulling firmware). Modern OpenSSH defaults to SFTP; -O selects the SCP protocol. The account can do nothing else — no shell, no uploads outside its store.

A backup is a credential. The archive contains your database, service tokens and the AAA encryption keys. Store exported backups encrypted, restrict who can read them, and delete stale exports from the transfer store (Settings → Transfer) once copied to safe storage.

A reasonable schedule

Nightly snapshots are automatic — nothing to configure.
Export (the off-box copy) on a cadence matching what you can afford to lose: weekly for stable sites, daily for busy ones. The two-command export is easy to script: ssh admin@<fqdn> backup export is refused non-interactively for the confirmation-free path, so drive it with an expect-style wrapper or run it as part of a maintenance routine.
Export immediately before upgrades or configuration surgery.

Restore

Restoring onto a fresh appliance is currently a guided procedure rather than a single command: install the same appliance version, complete first-boot setup, then contact support with your exported archive — it contains everything needed (database dump, environment, keys) to bring the new appliance to the old one’s state. A self-service backup restore is on the roadmap.