DNA Centre Backups

[BlueyVIII]

Has anyone found a simple way to automate the deletion of old DNAC Backups?

Our DNAC is set to backup to a Linux server each night, however, unless we remember to regularly go to the DNAC backup page and delete old backups the Linux server eventually runs out of disk space, and then the DNAC backups fail! As the DNAC Backup process doesn't send success/failure notifications the failures can go unnoticed for prolonged periods.

It would be fairly simple to create a LINUX CRON job to delete all the files older than (for example) 14 days, but I'm not sure if this would then cause a problem with the DNAC GUI which may not reflect they were deleted??

I'd be interested to see how others have solved the problem...

[Torbjørn]

You can clear old backups on your storage/backup server without issues. The deleted backups will automatically disappear from the DNAC UI without further intervention.

This tool (by Cisco employees) can be used to achieve what you are looking for: https://github.com/cskoglun/ciscodnacbackupctl 

[fgabo87]

Hi Everyone!

I have been told that if I click on the "Delete" button in DNAC at section "Backup and Restore". then the system does not delete the file from the server. Is it really true ?

[DJW487]

I have observed my files actually being deleted on the backup server when deleting from the GUI. Maybe it depends on catalyst server version and the file server?

[DJW487]

I created a python script that deletes backups that are older than specified period of days.

Modify to suit your tastes. I am not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, I just make things to work for me

I have 2 catalyst centre boxes now, so I do need to modify the URL to be a variable I can parse from CLI. I could also modify it to work from CRON on schedule, but I like to see what is happening with things sometimes so I just run this once a month right now.

I did create one that automates backups, since in the GUI you can only have one scheduled backup. I have a weekly full scheduled backup from the gui, then using API I have a nightly one that doesn't include assurance data.

[Tomas de Leon]

For Backup Retention & Automated deletion of older backups...

- In there current releases of the Catalyst Center OnPrem HW (P1.7), Backup Retention (in number of backups) is "not" available.

- In release 2.3.7.4 Catalyst Center on ESXi (P3.0), Backup Retention (in number of backups) is available. You can set the value from 3 to 60 backups and then the janitor cleanup is at 12am each day.

In a future release, both platforms will be a Platform 3.0 which will bring a lot of these features together. For your next question, which release? I will let the PMs answer that one as they have insights to the roadmap.

So the current method for deleting older or unwanted backups for the Catalyst Center OnPrem HW is to manually delete from the Admin UI one by one. Using scripts or removing on the remote file server has a potential for error. And this would not be optimal for your production data backups.

[rasmus.elmholt]

I have used this tool developed and maintained by some Cisco guys for a while: https://github.com/cskoglun/ciscodnacbackupctl

[andriio]

might be cool stuff, but we cannot use it on our hardened repos(