With policy stored in version control there are few things that should be preserved in your backup and restore plan.

Hub identity

CFEngines trust model is based on public and private key exchange. In order to re-provision a hub and for remote agents to retain trust the hubs key pair must be preserved and restored.

Include $(sys.workdir)/ppkeys/localhost.pub and $(sys.workdir)ppkeys/localhost.priv in your backup and restore plan.

Note: This is the most important thing to backup.

Hub license

Enterprise hubs will collect for up to the licensed number of hosts. When re-provisioning a hub you will need the license that matches the hub identity in order to be able to collect reports for more than 25 hosts.

Include $(sys.workdir)/licenses in your backup plan.

Hub databases

Data collected from remote hosts and configuration information for Mission Portal is stored on the hub in PostgreSQL which can be backed up and restored using standard tools.

If you wish to rebuild a hub and restore the history of policy outcomes you must backup and restore.

Host data

cfdb stores data related to policy runs on your hosts for example host inventory.

Backup:

code
# pg_dump -Fc cfdb > cfdb.bak

Restore:

code
# pg_restore -Fc cfdb.bak

Mission Portal

cfmp and cfsettings store Mission Portals configuration information for example shared dashboards.

Backup:

code
# pg_dump -Fc cfmp > cfmp.bak
# pg_dump -Fc cfsettings > cfsettings.bak

Restore:

code
# pg_restore -Fc cfmp.bak
# pg_restore -Fc cfsettings.bak