Our engineering department follows the configuration as code DevOps principles. The only thing we backup are jobs, meaning we can destroy and recreate the jenkins server at anytime. We manage all plugin configuration/installation and global configuration through a Chef cookbook. If anyone in the engineering departments wants a new plugin or needs to configure a plugin differently, we let them update the cookbook accordingly and we plan a scheduled maintenance sometime after hours. This involves recreating the jenkins server, running the cookbook against jenkins, and restoring the jobs.

One thing our engineering department would like to use is list views and build pipeline views, however these are stored in the config.xml. We manage slave templates through code so it'd be sort of hacky to template out the config with the views we want. My proposal is to separate out view configuration from config.xml. Doing this, we can backup the views.xml (or whatever the name of this file would be) and restore it alongside jobs at the end of the build process.

Or maybe there's a better process we can use to achieve this goal. Any feedback would be appreciated.