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Archive Data

On this page

  • Overview
  • Cluster Requirements
  • Required Permissions
  • How Atlas Archives Data
  • Atlas Data Federation for Online Archive
  • Limitations
  • Viewing the Online Archive
  • Querying the Online Archive
  • Managing Query Limits for Online Archive
  • Editing Online Archives
  • Deleting Online Archives
  • Online Archive Costs
  • Manage Your Online Archive

Important

Feature unavailable in Serverless Instances

Serverless instances don't support this feature at this time. To learn more, see Serverless Instance Limitations.

Atlas moves infrequently accessed data from your Atlas cluster to a MongoDB-managed read-only Federated Database Instance on a cloud object storage. Once Atlas archives the data, you have a unified view of your Atlas and Online Archive data through a read-only federated database instance.

Atlas archives data based on the criteria you specify in an archiving rule. The criteria varies based on the type of collection you want to archive:

When you configure an Online Archive on your cluster, Atlas creates 2 federated database instances:

  • Federated Database Instance for your archive that allows you to query data on your archive only.

  • Federated Database Instance for your cluster and archive that allows you to query both your cluster and archived data.

Online Archive in Atlas is available only on M10 and greater clusters.

To create or delete an Online Archive, you must have one of these roles:

To archive data:

  1. For each archive, Atlas runs a query in the archive's namespace to identify the documents that match the criteria for archiving. Atlas refers to this query on a particular archive's namespace as a job.

    By default, Atlas runs the job every five minutes. If the size of documents to archive doesn't meet the threshold, Atlas expands the job interval by five minutes, up to a maximum of four hours. If the job interval reaches the maximum or if the size of documents to archive reaches the threshold, Atlas runs the job again and resets the job interval to five minutes. The threshold is 2GB per job.

    If you specify a time window when you want to run the job, Atlas runs the job continuously during that time window. If a running job doesn't complete during the time window, Atlas continues to run the job until it completes. If all archiving jobs reach the maximum threshold for either the size or number of documents to archive during three consecutive archive windows, we recommend that you increase the frequency.

    Atlas runs an index sufficiency query to determine the efficiency of the archival process. If the number of documents scanned to the number of documents returned is 10 or more, the query result triggers an Index Sufficiency Warning. This warning indicates that you have insufficient indexes for an efficient archival process. For date-based archives, you must index the date field. For custom criteria that use an expression, Atlas might first convert a value before it evaluates it against the query.

  2. For documents that match the archival criteria, Atlas:

    1. Writes to up to a maximum of 10,000 partitions per data archiving job.

    2. Writes up to 2GB of document data to partitions on the cloud object storage for each unique combination of query field values except dates, which are grouped during each run to reduce the number of partitions.

    3. Writes each subsequent quantity of document data (up to 2 GB) with each query run.

Note

The interval between each archival job is five minutes. Atlas runs the next archival job five minutes after the currently running job completes. The time it takes to complete an archival job depends on a number of factors including the cluster resources.

Online Archive runs on your Atlas cluster and uses the same underlying resources, such as IOPS. The default limit of 2GB per job prevents the operation from using too many resources. If your cluster is currently satisfying workloads at the edge of its resource limits, you could push it past its capacity by activating Online Archive. Ensure that your Atlas cluster has excess resources before activating Online Archive.

If you activate Online Archive, you can select one of the following regions to store your archived data.

Data Federation Regions
AWS Regions
Virginia, USA
us-east-1
Oregon, USA
us-west-2
Sao Paulo, Brazil
sa-east-1
Ireland
eu-west-1
London, England
eu-west-2
Frankfurt, Germany
eu-central-1
Mumbai, India
ap-south-1
Singapore
ap-southeast-1
Sydney, Australia
ap-southeast-2

Important

Atlas encrypts your archived data using Amazon's server-side encryption S3-managed keys (SSE-S3) for archived data. It can't use any encryption-at-rest encryption keys you might have used on your cluster data.

When you archive data, Atlas first copies the data to the cloud object storage and then deletes the data from your Atlas cluster. During archival, for a brief period of time, you might see duplicate documents on your Atlas cluster and the Online Archive. But after the archival and when your Online Archive state is idle, the already archived documents won't be present in your Atlas cluster.

WiredTiger doesn't release the storage blocks of the deleted data back to the OS for performance reasons. However, Atlas eventually automatically reuses these storage blocks for new data. This helps the Atlas cluster to avoid fragmentation. To learn more, see How do I reclaim disk space in WiredTiger?.

Your Online Archive is read-only. Atlas doesn't update archived data. You can configure deletion of archived data after a certain period of time. To purge archived data, configure the Deletion Age Limit setting for your Online Archive when you create or modify the Online Archive. Atlas doesn't sync your Online Archive with the Atlas cluster to maintain consistency after the data is archived.

Atlas provides a unified endpoint. You can use it to query all databases and collections on your live cluster and archived data using the same database and collection name that you use in your Atlas cluster. You can't use the unified endpoint over a Network Peering Connection, but you can set up a private endpoint or use a standard internet connection over TLS.

Note

Configuring an Online Archive doesn't eliminate the need for a backup policy. We recommend that you configure a backup policy that meets your requirements. To learn more about configuring a backup policy, see Back Up Your Database Deployment.

When you configure your M10 or greater Atlas cluster for Online Archive, Atlas creates a read-only Federated Database Instance, one per cluster, for your archived data.

Online Archive doesn't support the following:

  • Writing to the Online Archive.

  • Configuring or administering the Online Archive federated database instance through the Atlas console, Atlas Data Federation CLI, or Atlas Data Federation API.

  • Archiving a capped collection.

  • Archiving data below the size of 5 MiB after 7 days. To learn more, see Limitations.

  • GridFS.

To view your federated database instance for the Online Archive:

  1. Log in to the Atlas console.

  2. Click Data Federation from the left navigation in your Project page.

To query your Online Archive data, use the connection string through the Online Archive or federated database instance Connect button to connect to the federated database instance.

You can also query your Online Archive data with SQL. To learn more, see Query with Atlas SQL.

You can configure limits on the amount of data that is processed for your queries against archived data to control the data processing costs for your Online Archive. When the amount of processed data reaches any applicable configured limit, Atlas won't execute any new queries and returns an error to the client application that a limit has been reached. You can also optionally configure query termination to terminate queries that exceed the limit. To learn more, see Manage Atlas Data Federation Query Limits.

Once Atlas creates the Online Archive, you can't change the archiving criteria from Date Match to Custom Filter, or vice versa.

If you delete all the Online Archives, Atlas deletes the federated database instances. After deleting all the Online Archives, if you create an Online Archive with the same settings as a deleted Online Archive, Atlas creates a new federated database instance for the new Online Archive.

Online Archive stores infrequently accessed data to lower the data storage costs on your Atlas cluster. However, you incur costs for amount of data that you transfer and query. To learn more, see Online Archive Costs.

You can configure an Online Archive for a collection on your cluster through your Atlas console and API. Once you create an Online Archive, you can:

←  Import Archive from S3Configure Online Archive →