ACI – Access the Snapshots via CLI

When I planned to do a factory reset of my APIC in the Lab, I wanted to create a snapshot of the current configuration directly copy it down to my Laptop. Over the GUI, there is no way to do this. You can just create a local snapshot on the APIC or send it to a remote location which needs to be a FTP/SCP/SFTP Server. But you can’t simply download it.

After a bit of research, I figured out how to locate the file on the file system of the APIC and how to download it. It’s actually pretty easy:

The first necessary command is: show snapshot files

apic1# show snapshot files  
File    : ce2_DailyAutoBackup-2017-06-06T17-00-17.tar.gz
Created : 2017-06-06T17:00:18.343+02:00
Root    : 
Size    : 251913

File    : ce2_DailyAutoBackup-2017-06-07T01-00-22.tar.gz
Created : 2017-06-07T01:00:23.468+02:00
Root    : 
Size    : 251939

File    : ce2_DailyAutoBackup-2017-06-07T09-00-27.tar.gz
Created : 2017-06-07T09:00:28.958+02:00
Root    : 
Size    : 251809

To find in which folder the APIC is storing the snapshots is a bit more tricky. If you do a standard find / -iname ce2_DailyAutoBackup-2017-06-07T09-00-27.tar.gz you’ll get a ton of “Permission denied” and “No such file or directory” messages.

apic1# find / -iname ce2_DailyAutoBackup-2017-06-07T09-00-27.tar.gz
find: '/usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d': Permission denied
find: '/usr/libexec/initscripts/legacy-actions/auditd': Permission denied
find: '/usr/lib/firewalld': Permission denied

I haven’t found a way to get sudo working with the find command, I had to to a small tweak to the find command so that it don’t list the Permission denied and No such file or directory.

apic1# find / -iname "ce2_DailyAutoBackup-2017-06-07T09-00-27.tar.gz" 2>/dev/null
/data2/snapshots/ce2_DailyAutoBackup-2017-06-07T09-00-27.tar.gz
apic1#

Then you’ll go into the following directory:

apic1# cd /data2/snapshots
apic1# 
apic1# ls -la 
total 752
drwxr-xr-x  2 ifc admin   4096 Jun  7 09:00 .
drwxrwxrwx 13 ifc root    4096 May 25 16:07 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 ifc admin 251913 Jun  6 17:00 ce2_DailyAutoBackup-2017-06-06T17-00-17.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 ifc admin 251939 Jun  7 01:00 ce2_DailyAutoBackup-2017-06-07T01-00-22.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 ifc admin 251809 Jun  7 09:00 ce2_DailyAutoBackup-2017-06-07T09-00-27.tar.gz

And then you’ll take your favorite SFTP/SCP Client (WinSCP, Filezilla) and get the File from there.