Step 1: Back up the N-able N-central server

Before you upgrade, back up the N-able N-central server in the event of an upgrade failure. Back up the server to a destination FTP server or, if N-able N-central has been installed as a guest on an ESX or Hyper-V server, record a snapshot of the guest.

Pre-Backup Snapshot.

If you are running N-able N-central as a virtual machine, before upgrading, you may want to create a Snapshot of the virtual machine. To avoid corruption of the Snapshot due to database tables being cached in memory, you will need to shut down the N-able N-central virtual machine before creating the Snapshot.

N-able recommends shutting down the virtual machine and deleting the Snapshot after the upgrade has been completed successfully. Deleting the Snapshot will prevent increased disk write latency associated with the differencing disks used by Snapshot technologies.

  1. Click Administration > System Backup and Restore > Configure Backups and configure the backup properties.
  2. Click Save and Run Backup.

    During the backup, a backup file and a backup digest file are created. The backup file contains all of the information needed to restore the system. The SHA1 file contains a SHA1 checksum of the backup file and verifies that the backup file is not corrupted.

  3. Wait for the system to send you a notification about the backup success or failure.
  4. If the backup succeeded and you have not configured it to be uploaded to an FTP server, download the backup image from the N-able N-central server to a safe location:
    1. Click Administration > System Backup and Restore > Download Backups.
    2. Click Download Backup beside the name of the backup file you want to download and save it to a known location.
    3. (Optional) Click Download Digest beside the name of the backup file and save the digest file to a known location.

The downloaded files can now be used to restore the database. To continue the upgrade, proceed to Step 2: Install the N-able N-central server upgrade.