Backup Requirements

Before you back up your Tenable Security Center system, do ensure the following:

  • All Tenable Security Center services are stopped

To stop Tenable Security Center and all running jobs manually, you can follow these steps:

  1. Stop Tenable Security Center:

    # systemctl stop SecurityCenter

  2. Check if there are any processes still running:

    # ps -fu tns

  3. If any processes are listed, run the following commands to stop them:

    Note: Killing the process stops all running processes, including scans that are currently running. Since this is typically the last resort, Tenable recommends that you wait for around 30 minutes to allow all pending tasks to be completed.
    # killall -u tns

    # killall httpd

  1. Repeat the process until there are no Tenable Security Center processes running.

Tenable Core backup tasks attempt to stop all Tenable Security Center jobs before starting, so avoid having any Tenable Security Center scan jobs scheduled around the same time, and allow enough buffer time for the scan to finish before the scheduled backup time.

  • Avoid having any resource-intensive jobs around the same time to prevent resource contention

  • Sufficient disk space on the host

For Tenable Core:

It is assumed that you have configured remote storage as per the steps in Configure Storage for Tenable Core Backups.

Before transferring the backup to the remote store, Tenable Core first compresses the contents of the resource chosen for the backup on /opt/tenablecore/backup/tmp. This means the free storage on the /opt partition of Tenable Core must be twice the total occupied space of the /opt/ directory for the initial compression to succeed.

That is, if Tenable Security Center is 2 GB, /opt needs a minimum of 4 GB free space.

For more information, see the Tenable Core remote backup fails with error 'Not enough space to take the requested backup' knowledge base article.

For Tenable Security Center supported Unix hosts, Tenable recommends similar amounts of free space to avoid the archival commands running into errors due to insufficient disk space.