 So I had a couple people ask me about this, which is backup and restore of PFSense. Like, how do I back it up? Or how do I restore it from a crashed one? Or how do I recover the file? Because I've actually had to help a friend with that. And, you know, there's some ways you can recover it. So this is kind of a quick overview. It's not a long video, but it'll kind of get you real familiar with how the backup and restore works. So here we have my demo box, which has random things installed on it. I've got the VPN set up, for example, from my PIA video I did. And I still have Sericata and customizations and all configured in here. So obviously, everything breaks at some point you wear it out. If you're lucky, never breaks. Great. Good for you. But, you know, especially working in IT, we know things go wrong, things go awry. So we're going to go ahead and do a quick backup. Now, I do recommend you encrypt your backup, put a password on it. We're not going to do it for this video because I'm lazy. You can back up everything or specific things if you want. You can also, by default, it does not back up all the log data that's in here. So it tells you, you know, if like the R&D data. But we're just going to download the configuration data. Now this does contain package configuration as well. So we're going to go ahead and download the XML file. And there's our config. So here's this working PF SenseBox. There's the config. Let's say disaster strikes. So we're going to simulate a disaster by going ahead and dragging this over here. And just resetting to factory defaults. I could do a reload and simulate the same thing, but we're going to put this system at complete factory defaults. So we're going to go ahead here and choose option four. Yep. We're just blowing it away. Now, it does this fairly quickly on my computer and does this really on if you got a decent SSD. And if you ever screw up PF Sense that bad, I always recommend before you start playing with a bunch of settings. If it's in your production environment, do a backup just before just in case whatever you do actually locks yourself out of it. So for example, turning on blocking on the land side. If you're playing with Sericata, you can lock yourself right out of the system. So that was the factory reset. It restarts. And then I'm going to, it's going to kick me out here in a second. And then I'll just log back in with the default admin and PF Sense. All right. So it is now right back to factory defaults. Go ahead and log back in. And it's admin and PF Sense. Just like normal. Yeah, next, next, we're going to leave everything at just absolutely default here because it doesn't matter. We're about to blow it all away anyways. Reload for new changes. Done. Then we just run over here to diagnostics backup restore. Choose file. Going to grab that file I just downloaded, which is right here. And if you notice the file contains the whole date, time exactly when you did it. So then we're just going to restore configuration and click OK. And it reboots the system. Now it's going to do something a little different when it does the restore. So when it does the restore, all the package details are going to be in there as well, including all my settings for Sericata. Because, well, I should have showed you, but I'm sure you can assume once it's that factory default, there's nothing. There's no information in here is why it ran through the wizard. So when it does this boot up, it's going to go through and find packages, redownload them and install them that I had installed. So we'll let you watch the machine here. Go ahead and do normal boot. All right. And now it's fetching all the packages. So it downloads each of the packages, extracts them, then it's going to run all the post configuration and start pushing all the rules. So the emerging set rule done, installing, updating configuration for WAN, LAN, starting the Sericata package after the configuration. And that fast, it's back up and running. So now we log back in again and we look at Sericata. Up, running, configured. The options and things like that from my last tutorial, they're all here. All the boxes are checked. The extra boxes are checked here. So it didn't do in a default install. It actually restores. And we've even done this ourselves. We replaced a hard drive in our free NAS box. We wanted a bigger SSD in it. All they did was I don't bother cloning or anything. I back up a configuration file. I push the configuration file back in. All the settings are there. Everything's right back where it was. The VPN settings for PA. Everything just goes right back to normal. And you're up and running in literally a few minutes on a fast machine. This is one of the things I really like about Be of Sense. So you don't really have to spend too much time thinking about it. Just every time we make a change, it's process procedure for clients. It's process procedure at our office. Make change, download file, add file to customer, document, and done. That way we have the latest backup based on the last change we made, and we can restore it. But what if you lose the server and it doesn't boot anymore, but maybe you can still mount the hard drive? Well, you can still get some files off of the hard drive. Specifically, you can get the critical file. So I SSH'd into the box. And we'll go ahead and open up a shell under CF. So CFConf, there's the config.xml file. Now you grab that file, and I think most everything is in there. I don't think it misses anything, but that's the file that if you wanted to restore your system and you forgot to back it up and you critically broke it, but had it, you know, such a long time or just maybe you never backed it up and you need some config files so you don't have to go through the whole process again. It's under CF.com if you grab that file. And the same thing, you just upload the config.xml file to that. It's not that hard to restore. I always prefer just to back things up so you don't have this issue. But this is really nice about PF Sense is when a box gets messed up and for whatever reason, like I don't know, a hard drive fails, I don't really have to think much about I just pop the hard drive, go to the last known good backup, put it in, it restores everything, even extensive configurations. To my knowledge, all of them, I think unless there's a note otherwise, all the different services have full support of saving their configuration into the XML file. I think there's a couple that maybe don't and there's some notes in there I haven't gone through every single one of them. But I can tell you some of the main ones, like Sericata, no problem. The config files copy right over so those packages get reinstalled without any issues at all. So that's just a quick how to backup slash restore a PF Sense box and why you don't really have to worry about cloning the hard drive or anything like that unless you are really, really go, man, I need all those extra logs and things like that. So you will lose some of that, but outside of that, you're good to go. You know, it's... I'll just lose a few log files. You can just go ahead and restore it, but if you want these somewhere else, you have the option to push them all to assist log server for other details. But if you like to content here, like to subscribe, hopefully I can just send this video to people who asked me that question. It's actually been coming up a lot of, how do you backup your PF Sense or how do I backup my PF Sense and will it restore everything? Because once you get it all configured, I know you're afraid to do it. That's why I don't mind my demo box. Just wipe it, reload it whenever I want. It's also kind of cool is I can keep multiple configurations files and just restore them as needed and I name them if I wanted to do a demo of something. So pretty simple system for doing it and thanks for watching.