Mikrotik Configuration Backup

Backing up Mikrotik configuration is easy. Just save the backup and copy it to your machine.

Terminal  Copy
 ssh router.local '/export file=mybackup'
 scp router.local:/mybackup.rsc /backup/mybackup.rsc

This results in a binary file you can directly load upon restore. And that's ok for the backup. But what if you want to track changes over time? Binary file won't do. Welcome text export.

Fortunately, we can also get /export to output the data in textual format. Since this data will include things like dates and similar things that change with every execution, we use awk and sed to remove those.

Terminal  Copy
 ssh router.local '/export' \
  | tr -d '\r' \
  | awk '{sub(/^ +/, "", $0); if (sub(/\\$/,"")) printf "%s", $0; else print $0}' \
  | sed "s/^# .* by RouterOS/# RouterOS/" \
  | sed "/^# managed by CAPsMAN$/d" \
  | sed "/^# channel: .*, CAPsMAN forwarding$/d" \
  | sed "/^# $/d" \
  > /backup/mybackup.txt

The result is reasonably clean file that can be committed to Git or any version control software of your choice.