Backing Up and Restoring Data
You can back up your Crowd data by exporting it to an XML file in the Crowd shared directory. The data includes:
- Your Crowd server configuration details, including connection details for all your directories and applications.
- Any internal directories that exist.
Important Note about Crowd Backup Functionality
We recommend that you back up your data regularly, especially before any significant configuration changes and before upgrading Crowd. You should also perform regular backups of your database and your Crowd Home directory.
To schedule daily backups of your Crowd data,
- Log in to the Crowd Administration Console.
- In the top navigation bar, click
> Backup. - In the Schedule Backup panel, select the Enable scheduled backups to XML and choose the time.
- Click Submit.
When scheduled backups are enabled, Crowd will create a daily backup in the /backups directory under your Crowd shared directory. Backup files will be rotated to retain the most recent fifty daily backups.
To manually back up your Crowd data,
- Log in to the Crowd Administration Console.
- In the top navigation bar, click > Backup.
- In the Manual Backup panel, select the Reset Domain checkbox if the backup file will be restored onto a different server. Selecting Reset Domain will reset the domain to blank. (After you restore the data, you can change the domain as described in Domain.)
- Enter an appropriate Backup File Name. This will be the name of the XML file that Crowd will create. When the backup process has finished, you will find the backup file in the
/backupsdirectory under your Crowd shared directory. - Click Submit.
To restore your Crowd data,
- Log in to the Crowd Administration Console.
- In the top navigation bar, click > Restore.
- In the Restore File Path field, type the path to the backup file, including the name of the XML file.
- Click Submit.
Active status and backups
While Crowd allows you to locally set the active status of users in directories without proper active status support (eg. OpenLDAP), those changes will not be stored in the backup XML. When restoring from a backup, all of those users will be subsequently reactivated. Crowd versions 3.4.6, 3.5.1, and 3.6.0 come with the possibility to export connector users to the backup file, allowing you to preserve the active flag status after a restore. This option however will increase the size of the backup file and may require increasing Crowd’s memory limits.
For this feature to work, new backup files must be generated with the “Backup connector directories” option enabled.