Back up the full server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Run flightctl-backup on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux host that runs your Podman quadlet Red Hat Edge Manager deployment to create a portable archive of database, PKI, and configuration state.

Before you begin

  • Prerequisites for backup and restore are satisfied.
  • Sufficient disk space in the --output directory for a full archive.
  • pg_dump is available in PATH when the deployment uses the internal PostgreSQL database.

Procedure

  1. Confirm that flightctl and flightctl-backup match the running Red Hat Edge Manager server:

    Run flightctl version when the CLI can reach the Red Hat Edge Manager API (use flightctl login if needed) so you can compare Client Version, Server Version, and flightctl-backup version. For more information about prerequisites for backup and restore, see Additional resources.

    flightctl version
flightctl-backup version
  2. Create a backup directory owned by the user that runs the command (example path): 
    sudo mkdir -p /var/backups/rhem
sudo chown "$(whoami)" /var/backups/rhem
  3. Run the backup. Use --output to set the destination directory and --config only if your service configuration is not in the default location: 
    flightctl-backup --output /var/backups/rhem

    Optional: specify a custom service configuration path:

    flightctl-backup --output /var/backups/rhem --config /etc/flightctl/service-config.yaml
    Note

    If --config is not specified, the default path /etc/flightctl/service-config.yaml is used.
  4. Verify that the command created a timestamped archive and checksum file: 
    ls -l /var/backups/rhem/flightctl-backup-*.tar.gz*
sha256sum -c /var/backups/rhem/flightctl-backup-*.tar.gz.sha256
  5. Copy the archive and checksum to backup storage outside the host failure domain.

Results

  • sha256sum -c reports OK.
  • Archive permissions are owner-read/write only (-rw-------).
  • If the deployment uses an external database, the command log includes DBA instructions and the archive still contains pki/ and config/.