Customize scope of backup and restore

You can use the --scope option to customize what data is backed up or restored.

By default, the puppet-backup create command backs up the following data, and the puppet-backup restore command restores the same data:

• Your PE configuration, including license, classification, and RBAC settings. However, the configuration backup data does not include Puppet gems or Puppet Server gems.
• PE CA certificates and the full SSL directory.
• The Puppet code deployed to your code directory at the time of the backup.
• PuppetDB data, including facts, catalogs and historical reports.

If you want to have discrete backup files, or if you want to back up some parts of your infrastructure more often than others, you can use --scope command line option to limit the scope of a backup or restore. The --scope option accepts one or more of certs, code, config, or puppetdb. If unspecified, the default value is all. For details about what is and isn't included in each scope, refer to Directories and data in backups.

For example, if you have frequent code changes, you might back up your Puppet code more often than you back up the rest of your infrastructure. When you limit the backup scope, the backup file contains only the parts of your infrastructure that you specify. Be sure to identify the scope in your backup file's name so you know what each file contains.

When you restore your primary server, you must restore your Puppet configuration, certificates, code, and PuppetDB data. However, you can restore each aspect from different files, either by using backup files that have limited scopes or by limiting the restore scope. For example, by limiting the scope when you run the puppet-backup restore command, you could restore Puppet code, configuration, and certificates from one backup file, and then restore PuppetDB from a different backup file.