Recovering IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center data

Use the icic-restore command to recover IBM® Cloud Infrastructure Center data that was previously backed up so you can restore your system to a working state after data corruption or data loss.

Before you begin to restore the data, ensure that your target system is properly prepared:

The backup archive can only be restored to a system that is running the same level of IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center as the system from which the backup was taken.
The new environment should duplicate the original user environment, such as adding users and groups that are assigned roles in IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center, refer to configuring security for more details. Otherwise, IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center users will not be available after the restore.
When restoring the backup on another IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center management node, make sure the management node is a fresh installation without managing any existing resources. Refer to Setting up an active-passive HA environment for more details.

The backup process does not back up SSL certificates and associated configuration information. A restored IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center environment uses the configuration that existed within the IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center environment before the restore operation, not the configuration of the environment from which the backup was taken. Keep this in mind when you are selecting an environment on which to restore.

The icic-restore command is in the /opt/ibm/icic/bin/ directory. For details about the syntax and options, run icic-restore --help.

Important: Most IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center services are stopped and all other users are logged off from IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center until the operation completes. VMs deployed by IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center are not impacted.

Complete the following steps to restore IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center data:

Open a command-line interface to the operating system on the virtual machine on which IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center is installed.
Navigate to the /opt/ibm/icic/bin/ directory.
Run the icic-restore command with any needed options. If prompts are not suppressed, respond to them as needed.

Typical icic-restore use cases

Run the command with v option to verify the SHA256 checksum and list the directory structure of the backup file. It does not perform the restore action:
```
icic-restore -v --targetdir=/tmp/backups
```

In the example, the target directory /tmp/backups is either a mount point for the backup NFS files system or just a local directory where the latest backup files exist.

Run the command with a non-default target directory to recover the data on IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center management node:
```
icic-restore --targetdir=/tmp/backups
```
Run the command with host option, which can recover the data on the specific compute node.
```
icic-restore --host <hostname> --targetdir=/tmp/backups
```

Note: If the IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center installation binaries are found on the compute node, the administrator must select whether to rebuild the binaries on the compute node before the data restore. Otherwise, rebuilding IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center binaries on the compute node is a must after the restore.

Run the combination of restore commands on management node to recover the whole IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center system.
If a data is corrupted or lost on management node and some compute nodes run:
1. Run icic-restore --targetdir=/tmp/backups to recover the management node first.
2. Run icic-restore --host <hostname> --targetdir=/tmp/backups for each compute node one by one.
3. Run icic-services restart to restart IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center system.

Note: If an error occurs while running icic-restore, check for errors in the icic-restore logs in /opt/ibm/icic/log.