Backing Up and Restoring the Cisco Configuration

Any changes you make to the router configuration are stored in the running-config file. And if you don’t enter a copy run start command after you make a change to running-config, that change will go poof if the router reboots or gets powered down. So you probably want to make another backup of the configuration information just in case the router or switch completely dies on you. Even if your machine is healthy and happy, it’s good to have for reference and documentation reasons.

 

Backing up the Cisco Router Configuration

To copy the router’s configuration from a router to a TFTP server, you can use either the copy running-config tftp or the copy startup-config tftp command. Either one will back up the router configuration that’s currently running in DRAM or that’s stored in NVRAM.

Restoring the Cisco Router Configuration
If you’ve changed your router’s running-config file and want to restore the configuration to the version in the startup-config file, the easiest way to do this is to use the copy startup-config running-config command (copy start run for short). You can also use the Cisco command config mem to restore a configuration. Of course, this will work only if you copied running-config into NVRAM before making any changes!
       If you did copy the router’s configuration to a TFTP server as a second backup, you can restore the configuration using the copy tftp running-config command (copy tftp run for short) or the copy tftp startup-config command (copy tftp start for short).