Sooner or later, you will rely on a node backup file while bringing your node back to life after a hard disk failure, node upgrade, or failed install of some add-on program or script.  It's not much of a challenge to restore a node from scratch within 20 minutes, if you have a node backup file!

If you find yourself in the unfortunate situation of needing to rebuild your node and lacking a proper node backup file, be prepared to jump through a few hoops to get back up and running!  It will take some time.  You will need to contact the IRLP installs team and open a ticket with them to begin the process of recovering your node.  You will need to prove that you are who you say you are, and request that they assist you in rebuilding your node.  A new set of PGP keys will need to be generated and your old key purged from the authentication server.  Your new key will need to be uploaded to the authentication server.  You get to look forward to some manual stuff that takes time and patience.  Since the IRLP installs team are volunteers with lives of their own, you will have to wait until someone has time to assist you with all of it.  You will be kicking yourself for not having taken 30 seconds of your time to login and make a backup while your node was functional and healthy!

So, how do you make a node backup?  It's surprisingly simple!  In fact, there's already a backup utility on your IRLP node that can be run from the command prompt, which will do it for you.  This utility will archive all the important files on your node into one file and then compress it.  The result will be a tar file compressed in gzip format (.tgz file).  Once the backup is complete, which usually takes only a couple of seconds or so to run, you will have a backup file that can and should be transferred to a secure location as soon as possible.  Don't make the mistake of faithfully performing node backups at regular intervals only to lose them when your node's hard disk fails!  Transfer your backups off the node immediately after making them.  You can use scp or sftp to copy the backup file off to your local PC or other location.  For those who manage their nodes from within Windows, there's a handy utility called WinSCP which makes it very easy.  Here's a step-by-step guide on backing up your IRLP Node:

1. login to your node as user repeater.
2. change to the scripts directory (do, "cd $SCRIPT" and press enter)
3. run the backup_for_reinstall script (do, "./backup_for_reinstall" and press enter - don't overlook the dot at the beginning)
4. a backup file will be created at /home/irlp/backup/irlp_backup.tgz which you should transfer off to your local PC or other location

Now you will be prepared for the time when you find yourself rebuilding your node, whatever the reason!

* NOTE * If your node backup file was created after having installed EchoIRLP, then your node backup file will contain some EchoIRLP modified files which will carry over to your new node during the re-install process.  If you plan to re-add EchoIRLP support, it's a non-issue as long as you are aware that your node won't function properly until you get EchoIRLP re-installed.  However, if you don't plan on re-adding EchoIRLP support, you will need to remove the changes that your original install of EchoIRLP made to some of your IRLP files.  For complete steps on removing EchoIRLP from your IRLP Node, see my article on Removing EchoIRLP from an IRLP Node.