Backup and restoring Jenkins data is very much needed in case of disaster recovery, auditing and many more purpose, therefore having good backup and restore of Jenkins instance is critical and highly  important for the application .  Other than this, few other factors where backup is required:  Disaster recovery.  Recovering an older configuration (an accidental configuration change may not be discovered for some time).  Recovering a file that is corrupted or was deleted accidentally.  Files to back up:  $JENKINS_HOME: Backing up the entire $JENKINS_HOME directory preserves the entire Jenkins instance which include - build logs, job configs, plugins, configurations etc. To restore the system, just copy the entire backup to the new system.  In case taking back up only for the configuration file separately ,  we can check in the $JENKINS_HOME directory. ./config.xml where the main Jenkins configuration files are stored. Other configuration files also have the .xml suffix. Specify $JENKINS_HOME/*.xml to back up all configuration files.  Configuration files can also be stored in an SCM repository. This keeps copies of all previous versions of each file that can be retrieved using standard SCM facilities.  We have Jenkins Thin Backup plugin which is used to take back up in Jenkins. This helps to backs up of  all the data based on the schedule that we mention and handles the backup retention as well.   We simply need to install the 'thin backup plugin' in Jenkins under the Manage section  and enable from the setting tab along with the  detail such as what to back up and the backup directory.   Restoring:  Backup files are in the tar+zip format.  We can Copy these to another server where it can be unzip and un-tar.