About Backup and Restore

The ability to recover from a disaster is an essential part of any system maintenance plan. As part of your disaster recovery plan, we recommend that you perform periodic backups of your devices managed by Cloud-Delivered Firewall Management Center.

Backup managed devices

The Cloud-Delivered Firewall Management Center web interface enables you to backup Secure Firewall Threat Defense devices. You can execute an on-demand device backup or a scheduled device backup. The backup files are stored in Cisco's secure cloud storage that can be downloaded from the Device backup page.

Restore managed devices

You must use the Firewall Threat Defense CLI to restore the Firewall Threat Defense device. Understand and plan for the following:

  • Restoring Firewall Threat Defense overwrites all existing configurations with the backup configuration.

  • The Firewall Threat Defense restore process removes all VPN configurations from Firewall Threat Defense devices, including certificates added after the backup was taken. After you restore a Firewall Threat Defense device, you must re-add/re-enroll all VPN certificates, and redeploy the device.

Clear backup for optimal storage space

Cloud-Delivered Firewall Management Center stores only the five most recent backup of a managed Firewall Threat Defense device. When a new backup for the same device is triggered, the oldest backup file is deleted.

Backup and restore Cloud-Delivered Firewall Management Center

Backup of Cloud-Delivered Firewall Management Center is not supported from the application interface. As Cloud-Delivered Firewall Management Center is a Cisco-managed SaaS platform, Cisco handles the infrastructure resiliency, platform recovery, and disaster recovery operations internally.

However, if you want to store the Cloud-Delivered Firewall Management Center configuration files externally for version control or for any other compliance requirements, use the Import/Export feature. This feature allows you to export policies, objects, templates, and other settings through the UI or REST APIs.