Netbox: Backing up production data.

[lachlanjholmes]

Hey,

Just wanting to know what is recommend the best way to export/backup the data that has been placed into netbox system?

The wiki and docs doesn't really talk about it.

thanks.

[eronlloyd]

Because the data is stored in PostgreSQL, the best thing to do is become familiar with standard PostgreSQL backup and restore procedures. As for exports, that could be implemented as a CSV download link from Netbox.

[jeremystretch]

As @eronlloyd said, a simple PostgreSQL dump will do it. For example:

sudo -u postgres pg_dump netbox > netbox.sql

To restore the data to an empty database:

sudo -u postgres psql netbox < netbox.sql

[Ra1esh]

Hi,
I am trying to migrate netbox but I am failing at the restoring part.
I ran the command "sudo -u postgres psql netbox < netbox.sql" for restoring and I am getting the following error. I think it has to do with some permissions but not sure. I am not much familiar with postgres db, docker etc. but somehow I was able to get netbox running. Can anyone please help?

Thanks.

After I run the command I am getting the following error

sudo -u postgres psql netbox < db_dump_2018-12-03.sql
could not change directory to "/root/netbox-docker"
SET
SET
ERROR: unrecognized configuration parameter "idle_in_transaction_session_timeout"
SET
SET
SET
SET
ERROR: unrecognized configuration parameter "row_security"
S

[mchlumsky]

Just for completeness, you should probably also backup the media and report directories.

[AllenEllis]

In case it's helpful, this is the bash script I'm using to push database exports to Dropbox. It's smart enough to compare the checksum against the last backup and only save & push dumps that are changed from the last one.

I cloned Dropbox-Uploader to /opt/Dropbox-Uploader and followed his installation steps.

If you don't have zip installed, install it with sudo apt install zip

Then I created this file in the home directory of the postgres user (/var/lib/postgresql/backup.sh). Make it executable with chmod +x /var/lib/postgresql/backup.sh.

#!/bin/bash

time=$(date +%Y%m%d-%H-%M-%S)
mkdir /tmp/netbox-backups
pathtobackup=/tmp/netbox-backups/netbox-$time.sql
pathtochecksum=/tmp/netbox-backups/latest.md5

echo "Running Netbox backup at $time"

# backup the database
/usr/bin/pg_dump netbox > $pathtobackup

# generate a checksum of the backup
md5=($(md5sum $pathtobackup))

# compare against last checksum
lastmd5="`cat $pathtochecksum`"
if [ "$md5" = "$lastmd5" ]; then
        echo "Backups match, removing this instance"
        rm $pathtobackup
else
        echo "New checksum, zipping and pushing to Dropbox"
        /usr/bin/zip -9 $pathtobackup.zip $pathtobackup
        /opt/Dropbox-Uploader/dropbox_uploader.sh upload $pathtobackup.zip .
        echo "$md5" > $pathtochecksum
fi

To automate the backup, I switched over to the postgres user (su - postgres) and added this to its crontab (crontab -e). This example runs it every 30 minutes:

00,30 * * * * /var/lib/postgresql/backup.sh >> /tmp/netbox-backup/backup.log 2>&1

Per @mchlumsky, this script doesn't include the media or reports directories, so consider other ways to save those.