Examples described herein include systems and methods for backing up and recovering a software-defined data center (“SDDC”). In one example, entities of the SDDC, such as virtual machines, hosts, and clusters, can coexist with corresponding entity stores. The entity stores can store current state information for each SDDC entity. For example, an identifier or name of a virtual machine can be stored in that virtual machine's corresponding entity store. When recovery of a controller is needed, the controller can rebuild state information that has changed after the controller was backed up, by retrieving state information from entity stores of the various SDDC entities.