Docs Menu
Docs Home
/
MongoDB Atlas
/

Legacy Backups (Deprecated)

On this page

  • Enable Backup
  • Snapshot Storage Location
  • Snapshot Schedule

Important

Legacy Backup Deprecated

Effective 23 March 2020, all new clusters can only use Cloud Backups.

When you upgrade to 5.0, your backup system upgrades to cloud backup if it is currently set to legacy backup. After this upgrade:

  • All your existing legacy backup snapshots remain available. They expire over time in accordance with your retention policy.

  • Your backup policy resets to the default schedule. If you had a custom backup policy in place with legacy backups, you must re-create it with the procedure outlined in the Cloud Backup documentation.

Atlas legacy backup takes incremental backups of data in your cluster. Use Atlas legacy backups to restore from stored snapshots or from a selected point in time within the last 24 hours. You can also query a legacy backup snapshot.

For sharded clusters running FCV 4.2 or earlier, the backup service temporarily stops the balancer via the mongos to insert a marker token into all shards and config servers in the cluster. Atlas takes a snapshot when the marker tokens appear in the backup data. Sharded clusters running FCV 4.2 or later don't need to stop the balancer.

Note

You must have the Project Owner role for an Atlas project to manage backup for the clusters in that project.

Important

Collection Limit for Atlas Legacy Backup.

Your Atlas cluster can backup or restore clusters with fewer than 100,000 files across all databases. Files include collections and indexes.

If you have one or more deployments that meet or exceed the 100,000 file limit, contact MongoDB Support:

  1. In Atlas, go to the Project Support page.

    1. If it's not already displayed, select the organization that contains your desired project from the Organizations menu in the navigation bar.

    2. If it's not already displayed, select your desired project from the Projects menu in the navigation bar.

    3. Next to the Projects menu, expand the Options menu, then click Project Support.

      The Project Support page displays.

  2. Complete the requested fields to open a support ticket.

Back Up Your Cluster do not have a collection limit.

You can enable legacy backups when you:

Tip

See also:

To learn how to download a Cloud Backup, see the Restore from a Locally-Downloaded Snapshot page.

From the cluster configuration modal, toggle Do you want to enable backup? to Yes.

Important

This section applies only to sharded clusters running MongoDB with FCV 4.2 or earlier. If your sharded clusters run FCV 4.2 or later, skip this section.

Sharded clusters running MongoDB with FCV 4.2 or earlier require enabling cluster checkpoints to support Continuous Cloud Backup restoration from a legacy backup snapshot. Without cluster checkpoints, Atlas can only restore from a snapshot and not from a Continuous Cloud Backup between snapshots. After enabling legacy backups on the cluster, do the following to enable cluster checkpoints:

1
  1. If it is not already displayed, select the organization that contains your desired project from the Organizations menu in the navigation bar.

  2. If it is not already displayed, select your desired project from the Project menu in the navigation bar.

  3. Click Legacy Backup in the sidebar.

2
  1. Click next to your cluster's name.

  2. Click Edit Snapshot Schedule.

  3. Click the Create cluster checkpoint every: checkbox.

  4. Select an interval from the dropdown menu.

  5. Click Submit to save your changes.

Note

The sharded cluster balancer must pause whenever a cluster checkpoint is created.

Each project has one backup data center location dictated by the first backup-enabled cluster created in that project.

For single-region Atlas clusters created after June 21st, 2017, Atlas stores backup data for an Atlas cluster in a data center specific to the cluster's geographic region.

For multi-region Atlas clusters, Atlas stores backup data for the cluster in a data center specific to the geographical location of the cluster's Preferred Region.

Important

All additional backup-enabled clusters created in the project use the backup data center selected during deployment of the project's first backup-enabled cluster regardless of the geographical location of the cluster region or regions.

To change the data center location of a cluster, you must disable backups for all clusters in the project. You can then enable backups for a cluster whose geographic region corresponds to the data center location of your choice.

Cluster Location
Backup Service Location
USA
USA
Germany
Germany
United Kingdom
United Kingdom
Australia
Australia
All other cluster locations
Ireland

Atlas retains these snapshots based on the retention policy.

Atlas has the following snapshot schedule, which determines the frequency and the retention of the snapshots:

Note

If you disable backup for a cluster or terminate a cluster, Atlas immediately deletes the backup snapshots for the cluster.

Snapshot Schedule
Default Retention Policy
Maximum Retention Setting
Base snapshot every <x> hours
2 days
5 days
(30 days if snapshot taken every 24 hours)
Daily snapshot
7 days
360 days
Weekly snapshot
4 weeks
52 weeks
Monthly snapshot
13 months
84 months

By default, Atlas takes base snapshots every 6 hours.

To change a deployment's snapshot schedule, including the retention policy:

1
  1. If it's not already displayed, select the organization that contains your desired project from the Organizations menu in the navigation bar.

  2. If it's not already displayed, select your desired project from the Projects menu in the navigation bar.

  3. If it's not already displayed, click Clusters in the sidebar.

    The Clusters page displays.

2
  1. Click your cluster's name.

  2. Click the Backup tab.

    If the cluster has no Backup tab, then Atlas backups are disabled for that cluster and no snapshots are available. You can enable backups when you scale the cluster.

    The Backup page displays.

3

Tip

See also:

To modify the schedule using the API, see cloud backup schedules.

Back

Download Query Logs