Description

Learn about project backups and what to keep in mind when using them. Discover where project backups can be taken from.

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[00:00] Sometimes when working with Ignition resources, it may be necessary to take a backup of an individual project instead of the entire gateway. There are a few different ways to do this, so let's talk about each one a little bit. The first way that we're going to be taking a project backup is from the Gateway web page. So I have my Gateway web page up here and I'm in the Config section. From here I'm going to go to the Projects page. In here I'll see a list of all the projects on my gateway. So I'll find the project that I'd like to export, and then on the right-hand side I'll click More. And there are a couple of options here worth mentioning. The Copy option here will duplicate the project on our current gateway, and the Export option will allow us to download our project as a ZIP file, which we can take and restore onto a different gateway. So let's try that out. If I click Export here, we can see that my ZIP file has been downloaded. If I want to restore this University project onto a different gateway, I can just come back into this Projects page on that gateway, and then click Import project. And when I click Import project it will pull up a dialog where I can select which project file I'd like to upload, as well as specifying a project name, or overwrite existing projects with the same name. I don't need a second copy of the project on this gateway, so I'll just go ahead and click Cancel. By the way, one final note on these project exports, we can see that it's a ZIP file that's being downloaded. It might be tempting to think that the ZIP file contains the project export. In fact the ZIP file is the project export. So you don't need to extract out the contents of that ZIP file. You just upload the entire ZIP file when you import. One other note about importing and exporting project resources. The project export that I'm taking here can be restored onto the same version of Ignition or onto a later version of Ignition, but I can't take an 8.0.3 project and restore it onto a 7.9.1 gateway, for example. So now that we've talked about how to take project exports, let's also talk about the contents of our project export. So for this, I'm going to open up my Designer. One useful way of thinking about a project export is that everything in the project browser here on the left-hand side will be included in the export. So this means that my alarm notification pipelines and transaction groups and Perspective and Vision resources and reports from this project will be included in the backup. Notably absent are things like database connections, device connections, and tags. Only project resources will be included in a project backup. So keeping that in mind, while we're in the Designer here, there are a couple of other ways to back up project resources, specifically from the Designer. One of those ways is that I can come up to File at the top and then say Export. And what's different about this export is that I get this dialog appearing here which includes a list of all of my project resources, and I have the chance to pick and choose which ones I want to export. So whereas before we were taking what was called a full project export, meaning a total backup of everything in the project, from here we can take what's called a partial project export, meaning that we'll only export the resources that we pick. There is one final way of exporting project resources. So I'll go ahead and close out of this. Now suppose that I want to export my empty alarm pipeline here, and it's the only thing that I want to export. I don't care about anything else in the project, just this pipeline. I could do that from the interface that I was just in, but my other option is to find my project browser here, right-click on the pipeline, and say Export. You'll find that most project resources will have an export option on them allowing you to take a partial project export with just that resource included. These partial project exports will still be ZIP files. They'll still contain everything they need to run as a stand-alone project, but one option available to us in here is that with our project export handy, we can come to File, and say Import. So we can use these tools, both from the Gateway web page and the Designer here to easily transfer individual resources or entire projects from one gateway or project to another.

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