Gateway Backups vs Project Exports
It is a good idea to create backups anytime you make changes to Ignition. There are two main types of backups available in Ignition: Gateway backups and Project exports. You can choose to backup up everything, or be selective about what you want to backup and restore. Ignition is designed to be architecture agnostic or compatible across all platforms. This is particularly helpful when you want to restore your Gateway on a new machine or platform.
Gateway backups are all inclusive and Project exports are simply a backup of individual projects. Whether it is a Gateway backup or Project export, it's always good practice to create backups regularly when making changes to Ignition. This page discusses making Gateway backups and restoring from a Gateway backup. To learn more about project backups and restoring projects, refer to the Project Export and Import page.
Gateway Backup and Restore
Creating Gateway backups and restoring from a Gateway backup are super easy in Ignition. Gateway backups are all inclusive, and typically takes less than a minute to run. It includes everything you find in the Ignition Gateway Webpage. Everything gets backed up - all your projects, Gateway settings, authentication profiles, Tags, database connections, OPC and device connections, alarm pipelines, scripts, sequential function charts, reports, and Image Managment Library (i.e., png, jpg, and jpeg files). The only data that is not included in a Gateway backup is data stored in other programs such as SQL databases, PLC programs, other files you manually added to the install directory, and any additional files you may be using. This information needs to be backed up separately.
The following feature is new in Ignition version
8.0.14
Click here to check out the other new features
As of Ignition 8.0.14, Perspective custom assets such as fonts, icons, and themes are now included in a Gateway backup. In addition, any custom assets in a backup file will be restored when performing a Gateway restore.
You have the option of creating a Gateway backup and restoring a backup from the Gateway Webpage or Gateway Command-line Utility. We recommend using Gateway Webpage since it's much easier. Even better, is to set up scheduled backups to run on a regular schedule.