August 15, 2019

updated on August 28 ~ 2 min ~7.1k readers

Backing up a mongo instance is more confusing than it should be. Maybe you have run into a the input device is not a TTY or you simply don’t know how to do it? Here are two 1-Liner to backup and restore a running mongo instance.

Photo by Tobias Fischer on Unsplash

Setup

First we define our mongo instance like below. Notice that instead of mapping the data directory onto our filesystem we have a native volume.

docker-compose.yml

version: '3.7' volumes: db: services: db: image: mongo:3-xenial restart: always volumes: - db:/data/db ports: - 27017:27017

Then start with docker-compose up -d .

Backup

First we will do a backup of our running instance.

docker-compose exec -T db mongodump --archive --gzip --db mydb > dump.gz

The -T option is for enabling piping the output to our own machine. We also tell mongo to use the --gzip option to compress the file significantly.

Lastly we specify the --db <database> that we want to backup.

Restore

Whenever we want to restore a db, or maybe seed it we can run the following: