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Backup and Restore Mutliple Collections from a Database with MongoDB

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From a previous post we've Setup a MongoDB Cluster, and in this post we will go through the steps of backing up a database and restoring it to another mongodb cluster.

MLab offers a free Shared MongoDB Hosted Service with a limitation of 500MB, which I will be using to restore my data from my own hosted cluster to the free MLab service.

Create the MongoDB Backup

First we will need to create our backup path, and then backup our database, in my case, I am backing up my rocketchat database:

$ mkdir -p /opt/backups/mongodb
$ mongodump --host mongodb.example.com --port 27017 -u <mongouser> --authenticationDatabase <authdb> --db rocketchat --out /opt/backups/mongodb/

Change into the backup directory:

$ cd /opt/backups/mongodb/rocketchat/

You will find the bson and json metadata files for each collection:

$ ls -l | awk '{print $9}' | head -9
custom_emoji.chunks.bson
custom_emoji.chunks.metadata.json
custom_emoji.files.bson
custom_emoji.files.metadata.json
instances.bson
instances.metadata.json
meteor_accounts_loginServiceConfiguration.bson
meteor_accounts_loginServiceConfiguration.metadata.json
...

Restore MongoDB Database

We will need to restore all the collections to our new mongodb service, I have created a bash script (restore-mongodb.sh) that will restore each collection to our rocketchat database:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

mongo_user=<mongouser>
mongo_pass=<mongopass>

for file in `ls | grep bson`
  do
    for collection in `echo $file | sed 's/.bson//g'`
  do
    mongorestore --host mymongoid.mlab.com --port 12345 -u $mongo_user -p $mongo_pass -d rocketchat -c $collection $file
    sleep 2
  done
done

Change the permissions of your script to make it executable and execute the script:

$ chmod +x restore-mongodb.sh
$ ./restore-mongodb.sh

2017-10-03T22:05:39.138+0200    checking for collection data in custom_emoji.chunks.bson
2017-10-03T22:05:39.159+0200    reading metadata for rocketchat.custom_emoji.chunks from custom_emoji.chunks.metadata.json
2017-10-03T22:05:39.211+0200    restoring rocketchat.custom_emoji.chunks from custom_emoji.chunks.bson
2017-10-03T22:05:39.900+0200    restoring indexes for collection rocketchat.custom_emoji.chunks from metadata
2017-10-03T22:05:39.922+0200    finished restoring rocketchat.custom_emoji.chunks (20 documents)
2017-10-03T22:05:39.922+0200    done
2017-10-03T22:05:42.188+0200    checking for collection data in custom_emoji.files.bson
2017-10-03T22:05:42.231+0200    reading metadata for rocketchat.custom_emoji.files from custom_emoji.files.metadata.json
2017-10-03T22:05:42.252+0200    restoring rocketchat.custom_emoji.files from custom_emoji.files.bson
2017-10-03T22:05:42.623+0200    restoring indexes for collection rocketchat.custom_emoji.files from metadata
2017-10-03T22:05:42.645+0200    finished restoring rocketchat.custom_emoji.files (20 documents)
2017-10-03T22:05:42.645+0200    done
...

Checkout the New MongoDB Database:

Once the restore has been done, logon to your new mongodb database and have a look at the collections in the database:

$ mongo mymongoid.mlab.com:12345/rocketchat -u <mongouser> -p
MongoDB shell version v3.4.7
Enter password:
connecting to: mongodb://mymongoid.mlab.com:12345/rocketchat
MongoDB server version: 3.4.9

rs-mymongoid:PRIMARY> show collections
_raix_push_app_tokens
_raix_push_notifications
custom_emoji.chunks
custom_emoji.files
instances

Resources:

Thank You

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