What are tools that lend themselves for backup and recovery in a CI/CD environment?
The things that would be backed up would be the config files of the servers, the database and uploaded content as these will almost always be unique and necessary. The containers, VMs, even the webapps would NOT be backed up as these should all be uniform and constantly updated under the CI/CD principles. Currently I use a combination of scp and tar into an archive directory sorted by date and machine. I like to find something better if possible.


Config files, containers and VMs should be backed up and versioned by a tool like git or SVN if you are doing configuration management properly.. Backing up config files and versioning them is the whole point of configuration management tools like, salt, puppet, ansible, and chef.

As you duly note however, dynamic content such as database data and similarly dynamic data is a more challenging issue. These however, are outside of the scope of configuration management, CI, and CD principles. These principles purposefully remain silent on dealing with these issues: because they have no new answers for these problems. Instead, you should use the many battle-tested techniques and strategies for dealing with this kind of data instead of expecting CI/CD/CM tools to solve problems that they were never intended to address.