Here’s a helpful, real-world story about using /export on a MikroTik router.
Title: The Night the Power Flickered
The Setup
Mariana ran the IT for a small hotel. Her network ran on a single MikroTik RB4011—handling guest Wi-Fi, the PMS (property management system), security cameras, and the staff network. She’d configured it over two years ago, adding rules as needed. It worked, but she’d never documented it.
The Incident
One stormy Tuesday, a brownout hit. The router rebooted. When it came back up, the guest Wi-Fi was gone. The cameras were unreachable. Staff couldn’t print. The only thing working was the wired management port Mariana was connected to.
Panic. She logged in via WinBox. The config looked… incomplete. A corrupted sector on the flash had wiped out half of the /interface bridge settings and all of the /ip hotspot profiles. mikrotik export configuration
The Lesson from the Past
Mariana’s mentor had once told her: “On MikroTik, running config is not saved config. And saved config is not backed-up config.” He’d made her memorize one command:
/export file=backup-$(/system clock get date)
She’d run it every Friday, saved the .rsc file to her laptop.
The Recovery
She connected via SSH and typed:
/export
The current (broken) config scrolled by—short, missing entries. Then she opened her latest backup file from a week ago: backup-jan-12-2025.rsc. Here’s a helpful, real-world story about using /export
It was a clean, readable script. She saw exactly where the bridge VLANs were defined, where the hotspot server was bound.
She reset the router to defaults (after disconnecting the WAN cable):
/system reset-configuration no-defaults=yes skip-backup=yes
Then she dragged the backup-jan-12-2025.rsc file into WinBox’s Terminal and ran:
/import backup-jan-12-2025.rsc
The Magic of /export
Within 8 minutes, the hotel was back online. The guests never noticed. The PMS came back. Cameras started recording.
Mariana sat back, heart still racing. That night, she learned three things: Title: The Night the Power Flickered The Setup
/export saved her job. It gave her a human-readable, version-controllable backup—not a binary mess.Pro Tips from her recovery:
| Command | Why it matters |
|---------|----------------|
| /export hide-sensitive | To share configs without exposing passwords |
| /export verbose | Shows default values—great for learning |
| /export compact | Removes comments and defaults, smaller file |
And her new favorite script—run by the router itself every Sunday at 3am:
/system scheduler add name="email-backup" interval=7d \
on-event="/export file=auto-backup; /tool e-mail send to=\"it@hotel.com\" subject=\"Router Config\" file=auto-backup.rsc"
The moral: A MikroTik without an exported config is just a puzzle waiting to break at 2 AM. With /export, it’s a recipe you can cook again perfectly, any time.
To export a MikroTik configuration, you use the /export command in the terminal to generate a script-based .rsc file. Unlike binary .backup files, these are plain-text and human-readable, making them ideal for auditing or migrating settings between different hardware models. Core Export Commands
You can run these commands by opening New Terminal in WinBox or via SSH.
Export configuration via API - General - MikroTik community forum
/system reset-configuration no-defaults=yes skip-backup=yes /import file=branch-template.rsc
/export file=firewall-only from=/ip/firewall