Create a backup schedule of your On-Premise Appliance settings

This article applies to our On-Premise Appliance Filter and Firewall product only, not to Cloud.

 

You can use Archive profiles to back up your Smoothwall appliance settings. An Archive profile is a list of settings and log files that you can choose to include in a manual or scheduled backup. You can use this backup to restore your appliance settings to an earlier configuration.

You can either schedule backups and save the files to your On-Premise Appliance for you to download, or copy all your backups to a remote destination of your choice in case of Smoothwall hardware failure, to create a backup archive.

Schedule backup creation

  1. Create an Archive profile to determine your backup settings.
  2. Go to System > Maintenance > Scheduler.
  3. In the Backup schedule section, select the day of the week the task should run on from the Day drop-down.
  4. Select the hour the task should run on from the Hour drop-down. Please note it is not possible to schedule to the minute.
  5. Select how often to delete archives in the table on the System > Maintenance > Archives page using the Prune archives drop-down. Select from Don’t prune, Over 2 months or Over 3 months.
  6. Select Save.

Archive all backups to a remote storage destination

Step 1: Create an Archive profile

Create an Archive profile to determine your backup settings.

Step 2: Configure your protocol

You can save your backup archive files using the Linux SCP protocol or Windows SMB protocol.

Go to System > Maintenance > Archives.

Linux SCP protocol

  1. Move to the Remote SCP destinations section.
  2. Select Export Public Backup Key.
  3. Install the public key on the remote SSH server. For details on how to do this, refer to the administrator's guide of the SSH server.
  4. Enter a name for the destination.
  5. Enter the Username of the account on the SSH server that you use.

    Tip: Only give the user write access to the specified Remote path.

  6. Enter the Remote path where you will store archives on the remote server, for example: /home/mypath/.
  7. In the Server field, enter the IP address of the SSH Server.
  8. Enter the Port number used to connect to the SSH server (usually port 22).
  9. From the Transfer speed limit drop-down, choose the maximum transfer speed when automatic archiving occurs. This prevents automatic archiving from adversely affecting the performance of another network's traffic. Select from Unlimited, 10Kb/s, 20Kb/s, 30Kb/s or 100Kb/s.
  10. Enter a comment if needed.
  11. Select Add.

Windows SMB protocol

  1. Move to the Remote Windows/SMB destinations section.
  2. Enter a name for the destination.
  3. Enter the Username and Password of the account on the server that is used.

    Tip: Only give the user who is a member of the Administrators group on the destination server write access to the specified remote path.

  4. Enter the Server and share name of the network and network share folder where you want to save the backup archive file, for example: \\10.0.11.134\Example_content_share.
  5. Enter the Remote path where archives will be stored on the remote server, for example: \Name_share.
  6. Enter a comment if needed.
  7. Select Add.

Step 3: Set the archival schedule

  1. Move to the Remote archival section.
  2. Select the day of the week the archive should run from the Day drop-down.
  3. Select the hour the archive should be run on from the Hour drop-down. Please note it is not possible to schedule to the minute.
  4. Select a destination from the Archive destination drop-down, as configured in either the Remote SCP destinations section or the Remote Windows/SMB destinations section.
  5. Select an archive profile from the Archive profile drop-down.
  6. Check the Enabled checkbox.
  7. Enter a comment if needed.
  8. Select Add.