Figure 13.8. The Jenkins Monitoring plugin
13.4. Backing Up Your Configuration
Backing up your data is a universally recommended practice, and your Jenkins server should be no
exception. Fortunately, backing up Jenkins is relatively easy. In this section, we will look at a few ways
to do this.
13.4.1. Fundamentals of Jenkins Backups
In the simplest of configurations, all you need to do is to periodically back up your JENKINS_HOME
directory. This contains all of your build jobs configurations, your slave node configurations, and your
build history. This will also work fine while Jenkins is running—there is no need to shut down your
server while doing your backup.
The downside of this approach is that the JENKINS_HOME directory can contain a very large amount
of data (see Section 3.13, “What’s in the Jenkins Home Directory”). If this becomes an issue, you can
save a little by not backing up the following directories, which contain data that can be easily recreated
on-the-fly by Jenkins:
$JENKINS_HOME/war
The exploded WAR file