How to Backup Your Router Configurations to TFTP Server?

Having a TFTP server on your network can be great as it allows you to send or receive files over the network. However, the transfers via the Trivial File Transfer Protocol of TFTP are not secure at all and it’s actually best for when you know the target location and the exact file that you want. In a large network, router configurations can matter a lot and when normally, you will have more than one router. In such a case, configuring each router individually will be both time-consuming and tiresome. If the routers are to be configured the same way, a much simpler and quicker solution would be to copy your router configuration and upload it to the others.

For this purpose, you can easily use a TFTP server on your network to backup your router configuration. Naturally, to do this, you would need to setup and configure a TFTP server in your network. When you have a TFTP server configured and ready to go, the remaining process is rather simple and can be done via a few commands only. With that said, let us get started and show you how to backup your router configuration to a TFTP server.

Prerequisite

Before we begin, there are a few things that you need to have before proceeding with the instructions that we are going to provide down below. First things first, you need a TFTP server. You can download the SolarWinds TFTP Server from here. If you don’t have it setup and configured, you can follow our detailed guide which is linked above to do so. In addition to that, make sure the server is running and you have the IP address of the machine.

Assuming you do have a TFTP server configured in your network, the next thing would be to have a telnet or ssh connection to the router whose configuration is to be copied. If you are good on both grounds, then you can follow through without any worries.

Backup Router Configuration to TFTP Server

To backup your router configuration, make sure that you are connected to the router via ssh or telnet using a terminal or the Windows command prompt. Then, simply follow the instructions given down below:

1. First of all, at the Router prompt, type in enable and provide the password to get into privileged mode.
2. Once you do that, the prompt should change which means that the router is in privileged mode.

   

3. Now, to copy the running configuration file to your TFTP server, enter the following command:

   copy running-config tftp:

   

4. You will be asked to provide the IP address of the remote host which is the TFTP server in this case. Enter the IP address.

   

5. Then, give your router configuration a filename that will be used to store the config on the TFTP server.

   

6. You have successfully created a backup of your router configuration and you should be able to see it in the Server Root directory of your TFTP server.