MongoDB Backup and Restore

Maintaining backups of your workspace data is a very important practice. These data backups can act as a safety measure where data can be recovered or restored in case of an emergency.

Rocket.Chat uses MongoDB as its database. With MongoDB, you have multiple built-in backup options depending on the deployment method.

In this guide, we are going to focus on how to:

  1. Perform a backup of your Rocket.Chat workspace data

  2. Restore your Rocket.Chat workspace data

MongoDB backup with mongodump

We are going to see how to backup our MongoDB database, using mongodump. mongodump allows you to create backups from standalone, replica sets or sharded cluster deployments.

From MongoDB server 4.4, you need to install the mongodump utility separately. Read more at the MongoDB database tools docs

Backup a MongoDB standalone instance

The command to backup a simple MongoDB standalone instance is of the format:

mongodump <options> <connection-string>

  • Running mongodump alone from the command line without any options will assume the database is located on localhost at port 27017 with no authentication.

  • When the backup is completed, a /dump directory is created.

Backup a remote MongoDB instance

Backing up a remote MongoDB instance can be done with the following command:

mongodump --uri="mongodb://<host URL/IP>:<Port>" [additional options]

See more options and how to use mongodump on MongoDB database tools docs.

You should see something like the image below when the command is running:

mongodump command executing

MongoDB Restore with mongorestore

After backing up your instance, you may need to restore the data at some time. That can be done using mongorestore. mongorestore allows you to load data from either a binary database dump created by mongodump or the standard input into the MongoDB instance.

Make sure you first drop any existing Rocket.Chat schema in your database with the same name as the one you are restoring.

  • The syntax for the mongorestore command is as follows:

mongorestore <options> <connection-string> <directory or file to restore>

  • The simple command below restores from a dump directory to a local mongod instance running on port 27017:

mongorestore  dump/

  • You can restore to a remote instance by running the following command:

mongorestore --uri="mongodb://<host URL/IP>:<Port>" /dump

You have the ability to also restore a specific collection or collections from the dump/ directory. See MongoDB docs

In a successful command execution, you should see a screen like the one below:

mongorestore command executed