INTENT AWARE CONTEXTUAL DEVICE CONFIGURATION BACKUP AND RESTORE

An example controller device that manages a plurality of network devices includes one or more processing units implemented in circuitry and configured to: obtain device-level configuration information from a network device of the plurality of network devices at a first time; determine one or more out-of-band (OOB) configuration changes between the device-level configuration information from the network device and previous device-level intent configuration information compiled from one or more intents maintained by the controller device to manage the plurality of network devices; and store the one or more OOB configuration changes associated with the network device in incremental deltas.