An introduction to Cacti maintenance
Cacti maintenance defines the standard procedures needed for backing up the database and managing the RRD files. As you've learned, the RRD files contain the polled performance data, whereas the database only holds configuration data. Let's take a look at both from a data management point of view.
Database
As you've seen in previous chapters, the MySQL/MariaDB is the main configuration repository for any Cacti installation, and all your defined hosts, templates, and graph definitions are stored there.
RRD files
The RRD files contain all your performance data, but without the database you will be unable to link these files to their original devices and data sources. Cacti offers two different ways of storing these files. One method stores all RRD files within a single directory. The other method creates sub-directories based on the host and local graph ID.
