Backup (single) SMA data

[quentinperceval]

Hi !

I'm implementing an ironport architecture with 2 ESA C-370 and 1 SMA M-670, with centralized message tracking (and reporting) on the SMA, and I would like to know a way to backup my SMA data and restore it after crash.

I saw in the user guide that it can be possible with a second SMA, but unfortunatly I only have one.

I saw in this forum several thread saying that it's not possible, but that was old posts, and I hope in 2013 there is a way to do this (I accept GUI, CLI, SSH, SCP, FTP or anything you need ^^).

I'm running AsyncOS 7.9.1 on SMA, and AsyncOS 7.6.3 on ESAs.

Thank you for your help !

Best regards

Quentin

[David Miller]

Unfortunately AFAIK it is still true that to backup an SMA you need a second  SMA.  You use the SMA command backupconfig (which configures backups, it does  not backup your config!) to set this up.  Please refer to chapter 13 of the SMA  user guide for more details.

SMAs grab logs from your ESAs in order to provide centralised tracking and  reporting.  You can make a separate copy of these "source" logs on another  system using FTP, SFTP, SCP, etc.  If you use SLBL they will still exist on the  individual ESAs, at least current since the last refresh from the SMA (by  default they are propogated every 2 or 4 hours depending on model, 2 hours on  M670 I believe).  The other major data item is your ISQ (if you use central  quarantine) and I believe that data is lost if your M670 is unrecoverable. 

[quentinperceval]

Thank you for your answer !

So if I understand well, if I make a copy of these "source" logs, and if my SMA die, I can re-introduce these copies into a new SMA and restore my tracking abitlity ?

I saw that the SMA get the /export/tracking files from the ESA via SCP, but I didn't find where these files are stored on the SMA...

Thank you for your help

Best

Quentin

[David Miller]

The SMA gets log files from the ESAs via SCP as you say.  I am not aware of any ability to copy log files onto the SMA (import data).  It may be possible to copy the old logs files back on to the ESAs, and then maybe the (new) SMA would find them and import them, but I don't know.  Maybe Cisco could comment. 

What I meant when I said you could copy the source files is that you could interrogate them outside of the ESA/SMA environment using grep or maybe a tool like splunk if you needed to.