Back Up, Restore, and Archive Data
Backups are copies of your data that encapsulate the state of your cluster at a given time. Backups provide a safety measure in the event of data loss. If you have strict data protection requirements, you can enable a Backup Compliance Policy to protect your backup data.
Required Access
To manage or restore backups for a cluster, you must have
Project Owner access to the project.
Users with Organization Owner
access must add themselves as a Project Owner
to the project before they can manage or restore backups.
Considerations
Be aware that:
Atlas backups are not available for
M0free clusters. You may use mongodump to back up yourM0cluster data and mongorestore to restore that data. To learn how to manually back up your data, see Command Line Tools.You can't write to your cluster while a backup restore is in progress for that cluster.
You must restore the backup to a cluster running either the same major release version, or the next higher one. Atlas doesn't support restoring to older versions.
You can still use backups made before an upgrade.
Example
To restore a 4.0 cluster to 4.2:
Restore the old 4.0 backup to another 4.2 cluster.
Upgrade the restored cluster to 4.2.
Cloud Backups
Available in M10+ Clusters.
Atlas uses the native snapshot capabilities of your cloud provider to support full-copy snapshots and localized snapshot storage.
Atlas supports Cloud Backups on:
To learn more, see Back Up Your Cluster.
To learn how to restore cluster from a Cloud Backup, see Restore from a Scheduled or On-Demand Snapshot.
M2 / M5 Snapshots
Backups are automatically enabled for M2 and M5 shared clusters
and can't be disabled. Atlas takes
daily snapshots of your M2 and M5
clusters which you can restore to clusters tiers M2 or greater.
To learn more about M2 / M5 daily snapshots, see
Shared Cluster Backups.
To learn how to restore cluster from M2 / M5 snapshots, see
Restore from a Scheduled or On-Demand Snapshot.
Serverless Instance Snapshots
Atlas uses the native snapshot capabilities of your cloud provider to support full-copy snapshots and localized snapshot storage.
Backups are automatically enabled for serverless instances. You can't disable serverless instance backups.
Atlas offers the following backup options for serverless instances:
Option | Description |
|---|---|
Serverless Continuous Backup | Atlas takes incremental snapshots of the data in your
serverless instance every six hours and lets you restore the
data from a selected point in time within the last 72 hours.
Atlas also takes daily snapshots and retains these daily
snapshots for 35 days. To learn more, see
Serverless Instance Costs. |
Basic Backup | Atlas takes incremental snapshots of the data in your
serverless instance every six hours and retains only the two
most recent snapshots. You can use this option for free. |
You can restore serverless instance snapshots to other serverless instances and dedicated clusters.
To learn more, see:
Legacy Backups
Available in M10+ Clusters.
Important
Legacy Backup Deprecated
Effective 23 March 2020, all new clusters can only use Cloud Backups.
When you upgrade to 5.0, your backup system upgrades to cloud backup if it is currently set to legacy backup. After this upgrade:
All your existing legacy backup snapshots remain available. They expire over time in accordance with your retention policy.
Your backup policy resets to the default schedule. If you had a custom backup policy in place with legacy backups, you must re-create it with the procedure outlined in the Cloud Backup documentation.
Atlas uses incremental snapshots to continuously back up your data. Continuous backup snapshots are typically just a few seconds behind the operational system.
Atlas ensures continuous cloud backup of replica sets and consistent, cluster-wide snapshots of sharded clusters.
For each Atlas project with legacy backups enabled, Atlas stores the legacy backup snapshots in the backup data center location where legacy backups were first enabled for a cluster in the project.
Continuous snapshots support restoring from the full snapshot or from a Continuous Cloud Backup between snapshots. You can also query a continuous snapshot.
With Atlas legacy backup, the total number of collections
across all databases in a Atlas cluster can't be equal to or
exceed 100,000.
To learn more about Legacy Backups, see Legacy Backups (Deprecated).
To learn how to restore cluster from a Legacy Backup, see Restore a Cluster from a Legacy Backup Snapshot.