Once you’ve setup the basic config of your switches, it’s important to backup your configs somewhere not on the switch. There’s nothing worse than not having a backup of your current configs and having to start from scratch. Especially if you’ve just done 20+ zones the hard way. Not that I would know what that feels like.

The first thing to do is create a backup job that copies the running config to the startup config, and then copies the startup config to a tftp host.

conf t
scheduler enable
scheduler job name backup_config
copy running-config startup-config
copy startup-config tftp://tftphost/backup/insertswitchname_cfg_$(TIMESTAMP).txt
end

Once you’ve done that, check your handiwork to make sure you’ve not made any embarassing typos.

show scheduler job name backup_config

Now you probably want to schedule your backup job to run at some kind of frequency.

conf t
scheduler schedule name nightly_6pm
time daily 18:00
job name backup_config
end

Check your schedule is good with this command:

show scheduler schedule

Happy? Good, me too. Because I’ve already backed up my configs. And so should you.

copy running-config startup-config

Oh wait, I created a job but put some garbage in it and didn’t realise until I saved everything. No problem, Cisco likes to use no for when you want to get rid of things. So to delete the job you just created …

conf t
no scheduler job name backup_config
end

As I’ve said before, my knowledge of Cisco SAN-OS and NX-OS commands is rudimentary at best, but I found these ones useful.