RRDDUMP(1)

🎀 RRDDUMP(1) 🎀

okay so bestie, this is the rrdtool manual page for rrddump, and it’s literally your “dump your RRD into XML” era. ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

rrddump — dump the contents of an RRD to XML format.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

rrdtool dump filename.rrd [filename.xml] [--header|-h {none,xsd,dtd}]
[--no-header|-n] [--daemon|-d address] [> filename.xml]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

The dump function writes the contents of an RRD in human readable (?) XML format to a file or to stdout. This format can be read by rrdrestore. Together they allow you to transfer your files from one computer architecture to another as well to manipulate the contents of an RRD file in a somewhat more convenient manner. No cap. 💅

• filename.rrd — the name of the RRD you want to dump. Your fave file, your problem. 🫶
• filename.xml — the (optional) filename that you want to write the XML output to. If not specified, the XML will be printed to stdout. Yes, straight into your terminal. 😭
• --header|-h {none,xsd,dtd} — by default RRDtool will add a dtd header to the xml file. Here you can customize this to an xsd header or no header at all. Pick your header era. 🎀
• --no-header|-n — a shortcut for --header=none. literally.
• --daemon|-d address — address of the rrdcached daemon. If specified, a "flush" command is sent to the server before reading the RRD files. This allows rrdtool to return fresh data even if the daemon is configured to cache values for a long time. When specified the RRD filename signifies a server side file, but the output (XML) filename refers to the local side. For a list of accepted formats, see the -l option in the rrdcached manual.

If you want to restore the dump with RRDtool 1.2 you should use the --no-header option since 1.2 cannot deal with xml headers. Important bestie, don’t skip this. ⚠️

rrdtool dump --daemon unix:/var/run/rrdcached.sock /var/lib/rrd/foo.rrd

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

To transfer an RRD between architectures, follow these steps:

1. On the same system where the RRD was created, use rrdtool dump to export the data to XML format.
2. Transfer the XML dump to the target system.
3. Run rrdtool restore to create a new RRD from the XML dump. See rrdrestore for details.

🦋 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES 🦋

The following environment variables may be used to change the behavior of rrdtool dump:

• RRDCACHED_ADDRESS — if this environment variable is set it will have the same effect as specifying the --daemon option on the command line. If both are present, the command line argument takes precedence. slay. 👑

👑 AUTHOR 👑

• Tobias Oetiker <tobi@oetiker.ch>

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That’s the RRDDUMP(1) tea from rrdtool 1.11.0, dated 2026-10-17 — byeee, bestie 💜