Backups¶

A working nova-ve install carries state in three places. A complete backup captures all three.

What to back up¶

Source	What's in it	Frequency
`/var/lib/nova-ve/labs/`	Every lab JSON + per-node runtime state directories	Per change (continuous) or daily
`/var/lib/nova-ve/templates/`	Vendor-converted templates from the EVE-NG importer + any hand-authored templates	After every importer run; otherwise rarely changes
`/var/lib/nova-ve/images/`	Vendor boot disks (qcow2 / .image / .bin / Docker markers)	Once per major import; large but mostly static
Postgres database `novadb`	User accounts, session state, audit log, app metadata	Daily
`/etc/nova-ve/backend.env`	Secret keys, DB DSN, admin bootstrap	Once at install; whenever rotated
`nova-ve-install-summary.md`	Admin password + config-file map	Once at install

The two backups you should automate¶

A — Application state (small, fast, frequent):

# Lab JSON + templates (skipping large image blobs):
sudo rsync -a --delete \
  /var/lib/nova-ve/labs/ \
  /var/lib/nova-ve/templates/ \
  /etc/nova-ve/ \
  /backup/dest/nova-ve-state/

B — Postgres dump:

sudo -u postgres pg_dump -Fc novadb > /backup/dest/novadb-$(date +%F).dump

Vendor images (slow, large, infrequent)¶

/var/lib/nova-ve/images/ is reproducible from the source EVE-NG / PNETLab tree by re-running deploy/scripts/import-eveng-templates.sh. If you have the source tree archived, you do not strictly need to back the images directory up. If you don't:

sudo rsync -a --delete \
  /var/lib/nova-ve/images/ \
  /backup/dest/nova-ve-images/

Restore¶

On a freshly-provisioned target host:

Run install.sh to lay down the runtime, services, and a clean /var/lib/nova-ve/ tree.
sudo rsync your state backup back onto /var/lib/nova-ve/labs/, /var/lib/nova-ve/templates/, and /etc/nova-ve/.

Re-import the Postgres dump:

sudo -u postgres pg_restore --clean --if-exists -d novadb /backup/source/novadb-YYYY-MM-DD.dump

Restart the backend so it picks up the restored /etc/nova-ve/backend.env and lab JSONs:
```
sudo systemctl restart nova-ve-backend
```

Re-import images if not part of the backup set:

sudo deploy/scripts/import-eveng-templates.sh

What is not in any backup¶

Running node state. nova-ve does not snapshot live VM RAM. After restore, every node is back to "stopped"; the next start re-builds runtime state from the lab JSON.
Host network configuration (apart from what install.sh re-creates).
TLS certificates for Caddy (if you set up custom cert provisioning outside the bundled flow).