RouterOS Backup and Restore

Having a backup of our configuration on the MikroTik RouterOS is very crucial. This is not only for MikroTik but also for any other network devices, it is always recommended to have a backup of the configuration and be saved in a safe place then in case we want to revert to the working configuration one, then we can just simply restore the backup.

In MikroTik RouterOS there are 2 different backups:

Binary (sometimes referred as image)
Configuration (sometimes referred as export)

Both of them they can do backup for our configuration. Let’s start speaking about the Binary one.

The Binary backup is a backup which can take all the configuration that you have in the router and save it in a file. This also includes the passwords and everything else.

The good thing about the Binary backup is that in case you have done any wrong configuration and you want to revert back to the old configuration, then you can just load the Binary backup and you will go to back to the configuration saved in the backup file. To mention, the Binary backup is not editable, that means that you cannot open the file of the backup and edit it.

As for the configuration backup, you can simply export the configuration of the router and save it on a file. This type of backup can be edited, so you can simply open the file and change what you want to change then import the new adjusted configuration to the router to have the new configuration. Think for example if you have made a configuration backup from one router and you want to put the same configuration on another MikroTik which doesn’t have the same interfaces as the first one. You can simply go to the export backup, change the name of the interfaces, and then import the configuration to the new MikroTik Router.

To mention, the configuration backup does not contain any passwords saved in the router.

Also on the configuration backup, you can export only part of the configuration. For example, if you have a very nice firewall filter rules in your MikroTik router that you want to put the same filter rules on another MikroTik router, then you can simply export only those filter rules and import them to the new router – that’s possible to be done with the configuration backup.

Now we know the difference between the 2 types of backups that we have on MikroTik RouterOS, let’s apply that on LAB so you can understand them better.