Back Up, Restore, and Archive Data
On this page
Backups are copies of your data that encapsulate the state of your cluster at a given time. Backups provide a safety measure in the event of data loss. If you have strict data protection requirements, you can enable a Backup Compliance Policy to protect your backup data.
Required Access
To manage or restore backups for a cluster, you must have
Project Backup Manager or Project Owner access
to the project.
Users with Organization Owner
access must add themselves as a Project Backup Manager or
Project Owner to the project before they can manage or restore
backups.
Considerations
Be aware that:
Atlas backups are not available for
M0Free clusters. You may use mongodump to back up yourM0cluster data and mongorestore to restore that data. To learn how to manually back up your data, see Command Line Tools.You can't write to your cluster while a backup restore is in progress for that cluster.
You can restore a backup only to a cluster running either the same major release version, or the next higher one. Atlas doesn't support restoring to older versions.
If the backup has a pinned FCV, the major version of the target cluster must match the major version of that pinned FCV.
Cloud Backups
Available in M10+ Clusters.
Atlas uses the native snapshot capabilities of your cloud provider to support full-copy snapshots and localized snapshot storage.
Atlas supports Cloud Backups on:
To learn more, see Back Up Your Cluster.
To learn how to restore cluster from a Cloud Backup, see Restore from a Scheduled or On-Demand Snapshot.
Snapshots for {+Flex-Clusters} and Deprecated M2 / M5 clusters
Important
As of February 2025, you can create Flex clusters, and can no longer
create M2 and M5 clusters or Serverless instances in the
Atlas UI, Atlas CLI, Atlas Administration API, Atlas Kubernetes Operator, HashiCorp Terraform,
or Atlas CloudFormation Resources.
You can still use existing M2 and M5 clusters and Serverless instances.
Atlas deprecated M2 and M5 clusters and Serverless instances.
Atlas will automatically migrate all existing M2 and M5 clusters
to Flex clusters. For Serverless instances, Atlas will
determine whether to migrate instances to Free clusters,
Flex clusters, or Dedicated clusters according to your usage.
To see which tiers Atlas will migrate your instances
to, consult the All Clusters
page in the Atlas UI.
Backups are automatically enabled for Flex clusters and M2 and M5
Shared clusters and can't be disabled.
Atlas takes daily snapshots of your Flex clusters and
Shared clusters, which you can restore to Flex clusters tiers or
M10 and greater.
To learn more about backing up your cluster, refer to Shared Clusters Backup (Deprecated) and Flex Cluster Backups.
To learn more about restoring your cluster, refer to Restore from a Scheduled or On-Demand Snapshot.
Snapshots for Serverless Instances (Deprecated)
Important
As of February 2025, you can create Flex clusters, and can no longer
create M2 and M5 clusters or Serverless instances in the
Atlas UI, Atlas CLI, Atlas Administration API, Atlas Kubernetes Operator, HashiCorp Terraform,
or Atlas CloudFormation Resources.
You can still use existing M2 and M5 clusters and Serverless instances.
Atlas deprecated M2 and M5 clusters and Serverless instances.
Atlas will automatically migrate all existing M2 and M5 clusters
to Flex clusters. For Serverless instances, Atlas will
determine whether to migrate instances to Free clusters,
Flex clusters, or Dedicated clusters according to your usage.
To see which tiers Atlas will migrate your instances
to, consult the All Clusters
page in the Atlas UI.
Atlas uses the native snapshot capabilities of your cloud provider to support full-copy snapshots and localized snapshot storage.
Backups are automatically enabled for Serverless instances. You can't disable Serverless instance backups.
Atlas offers the following backup options for Serverless instances:
Option | Description |
|---|---|
Serverless Continuous Backup | Serverless instances are deprecated. You can't create new Serverless instances, but you can still configure their backup. Atlas takes incremental snapshots of the data in your Serverless instance every six hours and lets you restore the data from a selected point in time within the last 72 hours. Atlas also takes daily snapshots and retains these daily snapshots for 35 days. To learn more, see Costs for Serverless Instances (Deprecated). |
Basic Backup | Atlas takes incremental snapshots of the data in your Serverless instance every six hours and retains only the two most recent snapshots. You can use this option for free. |
You can restore Serverless instance snapshots to other Serverless instances and dedicated clusters.
To learn more, see:
Legacy Backups
Available in M10+ Clusters.
Atlas ensures continuous cloud backup of replica sets and consistent, cluster-wide snapshots of sharded clusters.
For each Atlas project with legacy backups enabled, Atlas stores the legacy backup snapshots in the backup data center location where legacy backups were first enabled for a cluster in the project.
Continuous snapshots support restoring from the full snapshot or from a Continuous Cloud Backup between snapshots.
With Atlas legacy backup, the total number of collections
across all databases in a Atlas cluster can't be equal to or
exceed 100,000.