Mongodump multiple collections

Rajeev_Vishal · 2021-10-07T10:10:09.518Z

Hi Team,

Can we take mongodump of more than 1 collection in a single command?

Thanks!

steevej · 2021-10-07T12:34:23.831Z

According to the documentation https://docs.mongodb.com/database-tools/mongodump/ there is no explicit options for that. However, if you do not specify a collection, then all collections of the given database are dumped. You may exclude many collections by specifying the option –excludeCollection multiple times. May be using multiple –collection options could work like multiple –excludeCollection. It is worth the try. Share the results. Also take a look at the option –excludeCollectionsWithPrefix.

Rajeev_Vishal · 2021-10-08T05:42:58.092Z

Hi Steeve,

Yes, I checked that still thought to double check. I think mongo team should bring this feature soon. Will be useful.

Thanks,
Rajeev

Stennie_X · 2021-10-16T22:57:15.857Z

Hi @Rajeev_Vishal,

Can you explain your use case in a bit more detail? As @steevej noted you can use --excludeCollection or --excludeCollectionsWithPrefix multiple times.

There’s an open feature request to add similar options for including collections that you can watch or upvote: TOOLS-1731.

As an alternative approach, you can write a shell script to dump a selection of collections.

A very simplified example to mongodump a list of collections from the test database in a local mongod instance:

#!/bin/bash

# Array of collection names
collections=(foo bar baz)

for collection in $collections; do
  	mongodump --db test --collection $collection
done

Regards,
Stennie

Predrag_Stojadinovic · 2022-02-08T13:57:31.776Z

A use case is I have 170 collections and would like to dump 34 of them.

DataExtractor · 2025-03-05T07:08:41.016Z

I would love to see this come to exist too. My use case is that we have a massive production database with a large number of collections. We do not allow staff direct access to this database or its collections; only the application that interacts with it. Various staff need access to a small subset of very recent data, from only three of the collections, so our desired solution is to automate a mongodump that uses Views to extract only what they need, so that they can then import the daily dump into their own copy of Mongo and query as much as they like against it, with as poorly written a query as they feel like.

So in our case this would look like:

mongodump -d dbname --collection=view1 --collection=view2 --collection=view3 --viewsAsCollections --archive=/path/to/file

Since we can’t do this, we have to do three separate dumps, to three files, resulting in three imports. It would get worse the more collections (or views) you need.