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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.

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.

Be aware that:

  • Atlas backups are not available for M0 free clusters. You may use mongodump to back up your M0 cluster data and mongorestore to restore that data. To learn how to manually back up your data, see Command Line Tools.

  • 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:

    1. Restore the old 4.0 backup to another 4.2 cluster.

    2. Upgrade the restored cluster to 4.2.

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 Database Deployment.

To learn how to restore cluster from a Cloud Backup, see Restore from a Scheduled or On-Demand Snapshot.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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