The concept of backup and restore of data is a common practice followed, and it varies from system to system. Different approaches are used to backup the information that is residing within your database. MongoDB allows you to backup and restores the data, and in this chapter, you will learn about how this concept can be implemented in MongoDB.
Concept of Data Backup in MongoDB
Performing a backup of data is one of the essential and extremely required processes or operation in the database management system. The main motive for this is it becomes intricate to predict how and when your database's data get lost or damaged. Hence, it is a perfect and finest practice to adopt as your database gets set up, try to make sure that the backup of data gets created in lest of any loss occurs. Data backup means the copying of data from your existing database that helps in reusability or re-availability of the data sets when a catastrophic event takes place upon the data.
MongoDB officially supports two fully-managed techniques of backups. These are:
- Continuous Backup: This follows the approach of incremental backup of your data sets in a cluster. Also, it ensures that your backups are done usually just a few seconds later than the operation being performed in the system.
- Cloud Provider Snapshots: This is another form of storage which provides backup storage in local machine or system by making use of the native snapshot property provided by the cluster's cloud service provider.
Dump MongoDB Data
For creating a backup of your database in MongoDB, make use of the command mongodump. This command directly dumps all your data that are residing in your server into the dump directory. mongodump only detain the documents that are residing in your database as its backup data and does not contain index data. Then, mongorestore or mongod have to rebuild the indexes once the data is restored.
Instructions for Data Backup
- Initiate the MongoDB server using this command: mongod
- Then, in a new terminal/command prompt (cmd) in administrative mode initiate the MongoDB client system using the command: mongo
- Go to the necessary collection and execute the command: mongodump.
- As you run that command, you will see that all the data from the collection (e.g., my_project_db) got dumped.
NOTE: Usually, mongodump comprehends the data from your database and then generates a BSON file where the data gets dumped.
mongodump is not a mongo shell command, it is a separate MongoDB utility which usually can be found under MongoDB bin folder.
Overwrite Files
The command mongodump will overwrite your output files in case they exist in your data backup directory. Hence, before running the mongodump command several times either make sure that there is no longer need of the files residing in your output folder (i.e., by default: the /dump directory) or otherwise to avoid such issue, you can rename the folders or your files.
Restore Data in MongoDB
For restoring all your backup data in your server, MongoDB provides the command mongorestore. This will restore your entire data from your backup directory.
It is to be noted that both mongorestore and mongodump make use of or work with BSON data dumps, which are functional for producing backups as small deployments.
