What is the difference between backing up admin configuration and profile backup?

WPS or WESB server represents their administrative configurations as XML files. Typically, you should regularly back up these configuration files using backupConfig and restoreConfig commands. Also when restoring the configuration, you will have to make sure the level of the release, including fixes, matches the release to which you are restoring exactly.

The manageprofiles command-line tool allows you to not only create a new profile, but also to back up and restore profiles. A profile backup does a filesystem backup of the entire profile directory (not just the XML configuration) and the profile metadata from the profile registry file. The server to be backed up has to be stopped prior to backup using the manageprofiles command. For example, usage of this command would be:

manageprofiles(.bat)(.sh) -backupProfile -profileName profile_name -backupFile backupFile_name