How to backup/restore AEM local instance

If you're an AEM dev, you understand the frustration of a broken AEM instance during development. I break my local AEM instances more times than I can count, and usually, I have to redo my local AEM setup and which is a painful job.

To avoid this problem, I used to take the zip file of crx-quickstart. The pain point here is zip creation will take hours.

Recently I found simple tool,which will create backup of crx-quickstart.

I will explain how to use it and provide some additional details.

aem-backup-cli:

aemb cli is a utility that packages the AEM crx-quickstart folder so that we can restore it when needed. Everything you set up on an AEM instance is inevitably stored in the filesystem under the crx-quickstart folder, which makes it extremely easy to backup the whole instance. The only caveat, you have to do a backup while your AEM instance is stopped.Which is not bad since you’ll be doing this for local development only.

Installing AEM Backup CLI

• Install Node.js and grab the LTS version
• Install the CLI: npm install -g aem-backup-cli
• You should now be able to run aemb

Before You Backup

• You should only run aemb once you are in the AEM directory. (the directory that contains the AEM jar and the crx-quickstart folder)
• You should only run aemb after your AEM instance has been completely shutdown.

Now You can use any of the aemb commands, you can see those by typing help

Available Commands

    help [command...]              Provides help for a given command.
    exit                           Exits application.
    backup [options] [backupName]  Archive crx-quickstart in current directory and move archive to crx-quickstart.backups folder in current directory
    list                           List all available backups
    delete [options]               Delete a backup from available backups
    restore [options]              Restore a backup from a list of available backups

Examples:

# create backup named my-first-backup
aemb$ backup my-first-backup

# List available backups
aemb$ list

# restore a backup from a list of backups
aemb$ restore

# delete a backup from a list of backups
aemb$ delete