Update:: We recently released a live migration tool for MongoDB Atlas called mongomirror . Learn more about mongomirror on our documentation. : We recently released a live migration tool for MongoDB Atlas called

MongoDB Atlas brings the ability for you as the end user to no longer concern yourself with the day to day aspects of system administration of your MongoDB Cluster. Like many databases, Atlas exists to ensure your data is always available with little overhead to your organization.

On day one you may be concerned on how to import your existing data and take a test drive of Atlas. There are numerous ways to copy your data over from one MongoDB service to another, today we’ll focus on a simple export and import using mongodump and mongorestore .

mongodump

The mongodump binary is a utility for creating a binary export of the contents of a database. mongodump can export data from either mongod or mongos instances.

Exporting your data from mongodump can be done with a command that exports the data to the system you run the command on.

In today’s case let’s think we are working with a standalone we’ve been testing on our local laptop for a while.

MongoDB shell version: 3.2.7 connecting to: test > show databases local 0.000GB test 0.070GB > show collections testData

We’re going to export the test database that contains our testData collection. My local computer has enough disk space to handle this export, but when working with large datasets you may want to concern yourself with available disk.

bash-3.2$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/disk1 465Gi 96Gi 369Gi 21% 25216209 96623405 21% /

Indeed we have the space, so let’s go ahead and export this database:

bash-3.2$ mongodump -d test 2016-06-13T10:43:52.147-0400 writing test.testData to 2016-06-13T10:43:55.147-0400 [##########..............] test.testData 1326267/2900790 (45.7%) 2016-06-13T10:43:58.147-0400 [######################..] test.testData 2666589/2900790 (91.9%) 2016-06-13T10:43:58.670-0400 [########################] test.testData 2900790/2900790 (100.0%) 2016-06-13T10:43:58.670-0400 done dumping test.testData (2900790 documents)

We are now left with two files which contain both the binary document data in BSON format along with a json file containing metadata about your collection:

bash-3.2$ cd dump/test/ bash-3.2$ ls -al total 186976 drwxr-xr-x 4 jaygordon staff 136 Jun 13 10:43 . drwxr-xr-x 3 jaygordon staff 102 Jun 13 10:43 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 jaygordon staff 95726070 Jun 13 10:43 testData.bson -rw-r--r-- 1 jaygordon staff 85 Jun 13 10:43 testData.metadata.json

bash-3.2$ cat dump/test/testData.metadata.json {"options":{},"indexes":[{"v":1,"key":{"_id":1},"name":"_id_","ns":"test.testData"}]}

Important note: Since MongoDB Atlas will be managing your users for you from here on in, make sure to remove any files called system.users.bson and system.users.metadata.bson to prevent any issues with your import.

mongorestore

The mongorestore program writes data from a binary database dump created by mongodump to a MongoDB instance.

With mongorestore we should only need to create our Atlas cluster and then ensure we are whitelisted to connect. Here’s a quick one line command to confirm what IP you are currently using (including DCHP/NAT networks) according to the rest of the world. (Below IP is just an example)

bash-3.2$ curl icanhazip.com 1.2.3.4

Now we know our IP, we can add it into our collection of IPs we use for our cluster, go to the Security tab and “ADD IP ADDRESS:”

Now let’s validate we can connect to our Atlas Cluster from the laptop containing our export. Go to your Atlas Custer deployment page and find your connection string:

Click on Connect:

We have our info, let’s see if it works:

bash-3.2$ mongo mongodb://cluster0-shard-00-00-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017,cluster0-shard-00-01-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017,cluster0-shard-00-02-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017/admin?replicaSet=Cluster0-shard-0 --ssl --username jay --password MongoDB shell version: 3.2.7 Enter password: connecting to: mongodb://cluster0-shard-00-00-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017,cluster0-shard-00-01-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017,cluster0-shard-00-02-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017/admin?replicaSet=Cluster0-shard-0 2016-06-13T11:34:53.235-0400 I NETWORK [thread1] Starting new replica set monitor for Cluster0-shard-0/cluster0-shard-00-00-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017,cluster0-shard-00-01-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017,cluster0-shard-00-02-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017 2016-06-13T11:34:53.235-0400 I NETWORK [ReplicaSetMonitorWatcher] starting Cluster0-shard-0:PRIMARY>

Great, we are ready to import into Atlas!

Let’s make sure we have a user ready for the admin database:

We’ll modify our connection string so our restore command should look something like this (note, the --host option has a different format than before):

bash-3.2$ mongorestore --ssl --host Cluster0-shard-0/cluster0-shard-00-00-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017,cluster0-shard-00-01-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017,cluster0-shard-00-02-cbei2.mongodb.net:27017 --authenticationDatabase admin --dir=dump/test -u jay --password $PASSWORD 2016-06-13T11:46:00.071-0400 building a list of collections to restore from dump/test dir 2016-06-13T11:46:00.081-0400 reading metadata for test.testData from dump/test/testData.metadata.json 2016-06-13T11:46:00.099-0400 restoring test.testData from dump/test/testData.bson

The restore will continue till it gets to 100% and notify you when it’s done:

2016-06-13T11:48:36.073-0400 [#######################.] test.testData 88.3 MB/91.3 MB (96.8%) 2016-06-13T11:48:39.075-0400 [#######################.] test.testData 90.3 MB/91.3 MB (98.9%) 2016-06-13T11:48:40.701-0400 [########################] test.testData 91.3 MB/91.3 MB (100.0%) 2016-06-13T11:48:40.701-0400 restoring indexes for collection test.testData from metadata 2016-06-13T11:48:40.710-0400 finished restoring test.testData (2900790 documents) 2016-06-13T11:48:40.710-0400 done

Great, let’s log into Atlas and verify our data made it into our cluster:

Cluster0-shard-0:PRIMARY> use test switched to db test Cluster0-shard-0:PRIMARY> show databases admin 0.000GB local 0.098GB test 0.070GB

Now you’re ready to start using your application along with MongoDB Atlas! Start building something GIANT today!

Jay Gordon is a Technical Account Manager with MongoDB and is available via our chat to discuss MongoDB Cloud Products at https://cloud.mongodb.com.