How to Backup and Restore MongoDB Database with Mongodump

mongodump is a utility provided by MongoDB for creating backups of databases. This is an very useful utility and can be consider for taking backups for live servers databases very effectively.

All the below commands will run database server on local system. If you want to backup databases from remote server, add following switches –host db.remotehost.net –port 27017 –username myuser –password mypasswd

1. Backup MongoDB Database

There are various options to take backups of mongodb database. Use mongodump command to take all databases backup or a single database backup of backup of single collection.

1.1 Backup All Databases

To backup all databases you just need to run following command. Here /data/db/ is location of your mongodb data directory and /backup/db is location of backup directory.

 # mongodump --dbpath /data/db/ --out /backup/db/

1.2 Backup Single Database

Use this command to take backup of a single database (named dummydb) only. Backup will be created in /backup/db/ directory.

 # mongodump --db dummydb --dbpath /data/db/ --out /backup/db/

1.3 Backup Single Collection

This command will take backup of single collection from a database. Backup file will be created in dump/mydb/ directory

 # mongodump --collection mycollection --db dummydb

2. Restore MongoDB Database

mongorestore is command line tool for restoring mongodb database backup. Here /data/db/ is location of your mongodb data directory and /backup/db is location of backup directory.

# mongorestore --dbpath /data/db/ /backup/db/