Sitecore MongoDB Blog Series: Daily Backup Script

MongoDb provides excellent support for redundancy and reliability with replica sets and sharding. But what if you just want a daily backup of all your data on the entire MongoDB server?

Backing up your data on a daily basis has a few advantages:

• Ability to restore the database to a previous state in case of a catastrophic event in your application or database.
• In a test environment, you can test an insert, update or delete query or script with the confidence that if you do something wrong you can quickly restore the modified data.
• Create an export of your database to migrate to another server or a co-worker.

I create a daily backup of my local every day in-case I break something in my mongo instance. On my current project we are always working and testing Sitecore Contact cards.

I have a simple windows batch script I run with a simple windows scheduled task that will backup all mongodb databases and collections into a daily folder. This script leverages mongodump.exe. I placed this script in my mongodb bin folder, as a sibling to mongodump.exe: C:\Program Files\MongoDB 2.6 Standard\bin\backup.bat

@echo off
setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion

REM Create the new backup folder.

SET "folderPath=%C:\backups\mongodb\%"
SET "folderName=%date:~-4,4%%date:~-10,2%%date:~7,2%"
SET "backupFolder=%folderPath%%folderName%"

ECHO Backup Folder: "!backupFolder!"
MKDIR %backupFolder%

REM Run mongo backup into our new folder.

CD C:\Program Files\MongoDB 2.6 Standard\bin
mongodump --out %backupFolder%
ECHO mongodump completed successfully.

This script will create a new folder C:\backups\mongodb\yyyyMMdd and dump all the mongodb collections into this folder. Each database will have its own subfolder, and inside each folder will contain .bson files that represent each collection:

NOTE: If you run this script more than once in a day, it will overwrite the previous backup. If you need to run a backup more than once a day, modify the script to your liking.

Then you can set it up as a windows schedule task to run everyday. I run mine at 3AM. However this backup runs within a few seconds even with gigs of data so you could run it during the day with minimal impact if you turn your machine off at night.

To restore a backup, you can use the mongorestore command:

mongorestore <path to the backup>

For more information on MongoDB backups and restores, including parameters to these commands like the port number, I recommend reviewing the official documentation. Have fun scripting!