How to Back Up Content in Tableau Server

Losing your Tableau Server content is a nightmare scenario that can set your analytics efforts back weeks or even months. Fortunately, protecting your workbooks, data sources, and user configurations is a straightforward process once you know the steps. This guide will walk you through exactly how to back up your Tableau Server content, automate the process, and what to do if you ever need to restore it.

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Why Is Backing Up Tableau Server So Important?

Creating regular backups of your Tableau Server is one of the most critical maintenance tasks you can perform. It's not just about recovering from a catastrophic hardware failure, it plays a vital role in several key operational scenarios:

• Disaster Recovery: This is the most obvious reason. If a server crashes, a data center goes down, or a hard drive fails, your backup is the only thing that stands between you and a total loss of your analytics environment.
• Server Migrations: When you need to move Tableau Server to new hardware, restoring from a backup is the standard, most reliable method to ensure all your content, users, and permissions transfer correctly.
• Painless Upgrades: Before performing a major version upgrade, a full backup is a non-negotiable safety net. If an upgrade fails or introduces unexpected issues, you can easily roll back to the previous stable version from your backup file.
• Human Error: Sometimes, things just go wrong. A user might accidentally delete a crucial data source or an entire project gets wiped out. A recent backup allows you to restore the server to a point before the mistake happened.

Simply put, a solid backup strategy gives you peace of mind and operational resilience, ensuring your valuable data insights are always protected.

Understanding What Gets Backed Up (and What Doesn't)

When you run a Tableau Server backup, you are creating a single file with a .tsbak extension. This comprehensive file contains the bulk of your Tableau environment, but it's important to know precisely what's inside.

What the Backup File Includes:

• Tableau PostgreSQL Database: This is the heart of your server. It contains all the metadata for your content, such as workbook information, project structures, data source definitions, user details, group permissions, and site settings.
• Data Engine/File Store: All the .hyper or .tde file extracts that fuel your reports are included. Since these can be quite large, they often make up the bulk of your backup file's size.
• Configuration and Topology Files: Key settings detailing how your server is configured are saved, making it possible to replicate your environment's setup during a restore.

What Is NOT Included in the Backup:

A standard .tsbak file does not include everything. You will need to back up the following items separately if they are part of your setup:

• External Assets: If you use external files like custom background images or company logos in your dashboards, these are not part of the backup.
• Custom Drivers: Any custom database drivers you installed will need to be reinstalled on a new machine.
• SMTP Configuration details: If you've configured an external SMTP for server emails, this information isn't fully contained in the backup.
• SSL Certificates: For security, your SSL certificates and key files need to be backed up and restored separately.
• Custom font files: If you use custom typography in dashboards, that will not be included.

Always keep a separate record or backup of these external components to ensure a full and complete recovery.

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Pre-Backup Checklist: What to Prepare

Before you jump into the commands, a little preparation will ensure the process goes smoothly. Run through this quick checklist:

1. Administrator Privileges: You must have administrative access on the Tableau Server machine and be a TSM (Tableau Services Manager) administrator to perform a backup.
2. Sufficient Disk Space: Backup files can be very large, often proportional to the size of your data extracts. As a rule of thumb, ensure you have at least as much free disk space as the size of your Tableau Server data directory (e.g., C:\ProgramData\Tableau\Tableau Server\data).
3. A Secure Backup Location: While the backup is initially created on the server itself, you should immediately move it to a safe, separate location. This could be a secure network share, cloud storage (like Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage), or a different physical drive. Never leave your only backup on the same machine it’s supposed to protect.

Step-by-Step Guide: Creating a Full Tableau Server Backup

The standard way to back up Tableau Server is by using the Tableau Services Manager (TSM) command-line interface. This ensures a clean and complete backup.

Step 1: Open the Command Prompt as an Administrator

On your Tableau Server machine's start menu, search for cmd, right-click on "Command Prompt," and select "Run as administrator." This is essential, as the backup commands require elevated permissions.

Step 2: Stop Tableau Server

To ensure data consistency and prevent file locks, you must stop the server before starting the backup. Run the following command and wait for it to complete:

tsm stop

Step 3: Run the Backup Command

Now, execute the backup command. The basic syntax is tsm maintenance backup -f <filename>.tsbak -d.

Here's a breakdown of a recommended command:

tsm maintenance backup -f initial_backup -d

• tsm maintenance backup: This is the primary command for initiating the backup.
• -f initial_backup: The -f flag specifies the filename for your backup. While you can name it anything, it's a good practice to use something descriptive. You don’t need to add the .tsbak extension, Tableau will add it automatically.
• -d: This optional but highly recommended flag automatically appends the current date to the end of your backup file name. This is a very useful way to manage and quickly identify the time you took a particular backup job.

You’ll see a progress bar as the backup proceeds. Be patient, as this can take a while depending on the size of your server.

Step 4: Verify the Backup File Location

Once the command completes successfully, Tableau will display a message showing where the backup file has been saved. By default, it's located in the base file path for backups configured in Tableau. You will get a message in the terminal stating Backup file '<filename>.tsbak' saved to......

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Step 5: Move the Backup File to a Secure Location

This is a critical step. Navigate to the folder you've just been notified of from the step above, find your .tsbak file (e.g., initial_backup_2023-10-27-01-08-31.tsbak) and move it to your designated secure storage location off of the local machine.

Step 6: Restart Tableau Server

Don't forget to bring your server back online! Simply run:

tsm start

Once the startup process is complete, your Tableau Server will be running again, and you’ll have a complete backup safely stored away.

Automating Your Tableau Server Backups

Manually running backups is fine for one-off situations, but for consistent protection, you need to automate the process. This is typically done by writing a simple script and scheduling it to run regularly using your operating system's task scheduler.

Example Backup Script for Windows (.bat file):

You can save the following code as a backup_tableau.bat file. This script stops the server, creates a dated backup, starts the server, and then could even be extended to move the file.

@echo off
echo ===========================================
echo Starting Tableau Server Backup Script
echo Initiating Tableau Server stop...
tsm stop

echo.
echo Starting Tableau maintenance backup...
tsm maintenance backup -f mytableau_backup -d

echo.
echo Backup complete. Restarting Tableau Server...
tsm start

echo.
echo Backup and restart process finished.
echo ===========================================

Scheduling the Script

• On Windows: Use the Task Scheduler. Create a new task, set the trigger for your desired frequency (e.g., daily at 2 AM), and set the action to run the .bat script you created. Be sure to configure the task to run with the highest privileges.
• On Linux: Use a cron job. You would edit the crontab (crontab -e) to schedule a .sh shell script to run on a similar schedule.

By automating, you create a "set it and forget it" backup routine that ensures you always have a recent recovery point on hand.

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How to Restore from a Backup File (The Other Side of the Coin)

Having a backup is great, but it’s only useful if you know how to restore it. The process is the mirror image of backing up, but with one very important caveat.

WARNING: Restoring from a backup will completely overwrite all existing content on the Tableau Server target. It does not merge data, it replaces everything. Only proceed if you are certain you want to revert the entire server to the state of the backup file.

Here’s the quick-reference restore command, also run from the TSM CLI:

tsm maintenance restore -f <backupfilename.tsbak>

You’ll need to stop the server before restoring and restart it afterwards, just like with the backup process. You will be prompted at each step to ensure you are aware of the irreversible changes you are about to make.

Final Thoughts

Backing up Tableau Server is an essential administrative task that provides a critical safety net for your organization's analytics platform. By mastering the tsm maintenance backup command and automating the process with scripts, you can reliably protect your invaluable content against hardware failure, human error, and upgrade mishaps.

Manually administering big, complex tools like Tableau can feel like a full-time job. We created Graphed because we believe getting insights shouldn't require you to manage server backups or learn a complex new piece of software. Graphed connects to your marketing and sales platforms in a few clicks, and our AI data analyst builds real-time dashboards for you based on simple, plain-English questions. You can finally focus on strategy instead of struggling with report builders and server maintenance.