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If you have a need to back up your Meraki configs, there’s no easy way – until now. As part of our Automating Meraki suite, we have included a tool that can do just this.
If you have any concerns about losing your Meraki config - or an employee or hacker overwriting your configuration, backing up your Meraki configuration will give you peace of mind.
Apart from the ability to restore an earlier configuration, we also have the capability to send you a diff report - makes it very easy to quickly spot any suspicious changes.
How is Meraki backed up?
There’s a range of reasons you might want to back up your Meraki configs.
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management, so you don’t really get down to the command line.
Under the surface though, we can poll the API and pull the commands and store these in a text file.
Our tool saves that file with the device name, time and date – so it’s a unique file.
Back up as many times as you like and all your backups will be saved.
That allows us to do a diff on versions of the config – especially after change controls – or more likely when you don’t expect changes to have occurred!
Why undertake Meraki Backups
While you can rebuild any device in Meraki via the GUI, there are times and situations when a backup can be invaluable.
Here are a few real world scenarios:
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Replacement Device: A switch fails and you need to quickly swap it for another.
Typically you’d call off the new switch in the Meraki GUI and rebuild. When you’re under pressure though, it’s much quicker to swap the switch and apply the exact same config you had previously – this is faster, less pressure and you have the exact same config on the new switch.
Change Control: You undertake a change on your network and want to ensure full ITIL compliance and traceability.
In this case, you’d back up your devices before and after, so you have the complete log of exactly what was changed. To make this even easier to use, within our tool you can select those two backups and run a diff – check the exact changes you were expecting were actually applied.
Unexpected Changes: If you need peace of mind to know that nothing has happened on your network that you don’t expect, an automated daily backup can send you the file it’s backed up – if a change is spotted a diff report is sent to you, so you can automatically receive notifications on things that have changed.
Mistakes: Let’s face it, even the best engineers make mistakes!
In the event of an error you might not even know what was changed – with our backup tool you can quickly revert to the last backup. If you’ve been scheduling the backups, you’ll be able to revert to any backup file you choose – which can then be before the mistake was made. A quick and reliable way to revert your network to a working state, if an error has been made.
How the Meraki Backup Tool works
Each backup can be viewed in the tool – take a switch backup as an example.
Down the left-hand side are all the ports on the switch, and selecting a port shows the config that was backed up for it.
The tabs across allow us to explore the different features of the switch (Layer 3, Stacking and in this case Switching – you can click between these tabs to see different bits of the backed up config).
Backups can be Scheduled or Ad hoc.
Completed backups are listed for each device – by default, each backup is named automatically with the device name and the time / date. You can select these backups to restore or to diff against each other.
For the actual scheduling, you simply select the device to be backed up and the frequency – the name of the device is added and click ok – your device is now being backed up on that schedule.
Meraki Backup: Summary
The tool serves a range of purposes – the biggest allowing you to sleep at night knowing you have a backup of your key devices.
The automated email means you have that file in your email if there’s a major issue – and the automated diff reporting allows you to quickly spot changes from the last backup and quickly identify if anything has happened that shouldn’t have.
You can back up multiple device types too, so the tool is very flexible.
Change controls generally mean you need to log what was changed and the Automating Meraki tool gives you that evidence automatically – and if you need to roll back it is super simple and quick with the tool – at 2am that really matters.
If you have had your boss calling you because the switch he’s connected to has failed and you needed to swap it quickly – you’ll understand how useful our Automating Meraki tool is!