MongoDB Backups and Restore

From running thousands of production backups. The defaults and the docs leave out the parts that bite during an actual restore.

Dump from a secondary, stream straight to object storage

Point mongodump at a secondary so the backup doesn't add load to the primary, and pipe the archive directly to S3 with no intermediate file on disk. On a replica set, --oplog captures a consistent point-in-time snapshot.

mongodump --host mongodb-secondary.internal:27017 \
  --username "$U" --password "$P" --authenticationDatabase admin \
  --db "$DB" --oplog --gzip --archive \
  | aws s3 cp - "s3://bucket/$DB/$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).dump.gz"

Keep a latest.dump.gz alias next to the timestamped file so restore scripts always know where to look.

Save a collection inventory with every backup

You cannot inspect a --gzip --archive after the fact. There is no list, peek, or inspect flag, it's an opaque binary blob, and --dryRun finishes before the archive is demuxed so it tells you nothing. So write the collection list at backup time, right beside the dump:

mongosh --quiet --host "$HOST" -u "$U" -p "$P" --authenticationDatabase admin \
  --eval "db.getSiblingDB('$DB').getCollectionNames().forEach(c => print(c))" \
  | aws s3 cp - "s3://bucket/$DB/$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).collections.txt"

Six months later when you need a selective restore, you read the file instead of trying to remember what was in the archive.

The --nsInclude trap on gzipped archives

The docs say --nsInclude filters a restore to specific collections. It does, from a directory dump (one .bson per collection). But from a --gzip --archive, which is what almost every production pipeline uses, --nsInclude (and --nsFrom/--nsTo) silently restore everything anyway and throw duplicate-key errors on the collections you never asked for. The archive is a single multiplexed stream that mongorestore can't seek, so the namespace filter doesn't hold. This is real and long-standing (JIRA TOOLS-2023, open over six years).

The reliable approach is the inverse: --nsExclude every collection you don't want, generated from the inventory file. Don't hand-build 100+ exclude flags at 2 AM, script it to read the inventory and emit the restore command.

Tier collections so restore is a command, not improvisation

Decide ahead of time what gets restored, and keep the lists in the restore script:

• Tier 1, critical business data (orders, customers, products, inventory): always restore.
• Tier 2, regenerable (sessions, caches, tokens, search indexes): never restore. Restoring stale sessions is worse than having none, you log people back into dead state.
• Tier 3, historical/analytical (audit logs, history, analytics rollups): restore only on demand. This is the bulk of the exclude list.

When the incident hits you want to run a command, not write one.

A replica set is only a backup at w:"majority"

Write concern quietly decides whether replication is durability or just a live mirror. w:1 acknowledges on the primary alone, so a write lost before it replicates never existed anywhere else. w:"majority" means the data is on a majority of members before the app gets the OK. Match it to data criticality rather than setting one value globally: w:"majority" for data you can't lose, w:1 for the regenerable and the disposable. See mongodb-replica-sets for the full read/write semantics.

Test the restore before you need it

A backup you've never restored is a hypothesis. Practice the selective restore in staging, and time how long a replica-set member rebuilds from zero (delete a secondary's data dir, restart, and watch db.adminCommand({ replSetGetStatus: 1, initialSync: 1 }).initialSyncStatus). That number is what tells you, at 2 AM, whether to wait for self-healing or restore from backup. Point-in-time recovery needs --oplog backups plus mongorestore --oplogReplay --oplogLimit "<ts>:<inc>".

One adjacent footgun that kills backups: unrotated MongoDB diagnostic logs fill the disk and the primary goes read-only. Set systemLog.logRotate: rename with rotation and alert on disk at 80%.

This skill is built to grow. Add a rule when a real restore surprise has a stable, defensible fix.