Restore Tenable Nessus

Using the Nessus CLI, you can use a previous backup of Tenable Nessus to restore later on any system, even if it is a different operating system. When you back up Tenable Nessus, your license information and settings are preserved. Tenable Nessus does not restore scan results.

You can restore a backup even if it was created on an earlier version of Tenable Nessus. For example, if you are on Tenable Nessus 10.5.1, you can restore a backup from Tenable Nessus 10.4.0.

Note: If you perform a cross-platform backup and restore between Linux and Windows systems, after you restore Tenable Nessus, you must reconfigure any Tenable Nessus configurations that use schedules. Schedules do not transfer correctly across these platforms because the operating systems use different timezone names.

Note: If you restore a Tenable Nessus Manager backup on a different device or MAC address, the license does not validate properly.

To fix this issue, Tenable recommends that you run the nessuscli fix --reset command, then run the nessuscli fetch --register command to register Tenable Nessus Manager on the new device or MAC address. Alternatively, you can reset the license via your license portal.

This issue only applies to Tenable Nessus Manager when clustering is not enabled; the license validates successfully when restoring Tenable Nessus Manager with clustering enabled.

Before you begin:

To restore Tenable Nessus:

  1. Access Tenable Nessus from a command terminal.

  2. Stop your Tenable Nessus service.

    Tenable Nessus terminates all processes.

  3. Restore Tenable Nessus from the backup file you previously saved by running the following command:

    > nessuscli backup --restore path/to/<backup_filename>

    Tenable Nessus restores your backup.

  4. Stop and start your Tenable Nessus service.

    Tenable Nessus begins initializing and uses the license information and settings from the backup.