Back up and restore MongoDB® Databases with MongoDB® tools

Important

Managed MongoDB® is currently in private beta. Click here to join the waiting list.

Managed MongoDB® Databases provide fully-managed document Database Instances, with a MongoDB®-compatible API layer over a PostgreSQL engine to store and retrieve data.

This means you can use MongoDB® command line tools to use and manage your MongoDB® Databases.

This tutorial shows how to backup and restore your MongoDB® Databases with the MongoDB® mongodump and mongorestore command line database tools.

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

A Scaleway account logged into the console
A MongoDB® Database Instance
Installed a MongoDB®-compatible client
Installed mongodump and mongorestore tools

Important

This tutorial shows you basic restore and backup operations. If you need additional options for the operations, refer to the official MongoDB® documentation.

Make sure you keep the --ssl and --sslCAFile=<file.pem> options in your commands, as you will need to authenticate using the default SSL certificate when you connect to your Database Instance.

How to back up a MongoDB® Database Instance

To create backups, we will use the mongodump tool, which can create backups for an entire Database Instance, logical database or collection. It can also use a query to back up part of a collection.

Navigate to the Scaleway console.
Click MongoDB® Databases under Managed Databases on the side menu. A list of your Database Instances displays.
Click the database name or «See more Icon» > More info to access the Database Instance information page.
Download the Database Instance’s SSL certificate.

Important
Make sure you know the path to the certificate on your local machine, as it will be used in a later step.

Run the following command, replacing the values according to the table below.

mongodump \
  --host=<ip-address> \
  --port=<port> \
  --username=<username> \
  --password="<password>" \
  --out=/path/to/backup \
  --ssl \
  --sslCAFile=<file.pem> \
  --authenticationMechanism=PLAIN

host: the IP address of your Database Instance
port: the connection port of your Database Instance
username: the username of the database user created upon Database Instance creation
password: the password of the database user created upon Database Instance creation
out: the path to the folder where you want the backups to be stored on your machine
sslCAFile: the path to where your SSL certificate is stored
authenticationMechanism: the list of authentication mechanisms the server accepts

If no response is returned, the operation was successful. You can make sure the backup occurred by checking that new files were added to the destination folder.

How to restore from a backup

You can restore either an entire database backup or a subset of a backup using mongorestore.

The tool restores binary backups created using mongodump.

You can restore the backed up data to any database within any Database Instance.

Run the following command, replacing the values according to the table above. You must specify the name of the destination db.

mongorestore \
  --host=<ip-address> \
  --port=<port> \
  --username=<username> \
  --password=<password> \
  /path/to/backup \
  --db=rdb \
  --ssl \
  --sslCAFile=<file.pem> \
  --authenticationMechanism=PLAIN

db: the name of the database to which you want to restore the backup

If the procedure was successful, you will see an output like the following:

2023-09-04T17:50:29.893+0200	1 document(s) restored successfully. 0 document(s) failed to restore.