How Percona Backup for MongoDB works

Even in a highly-available architecture, such as with MongoDB replication, backups are still required even though losing one server is not fatal. Whether for a complete or partial data disaster, you can use PBM (Percona Backup for MongoDB) to go back in time to the best available backup snapshot.

Percona Backup for MongoDB is a command line interface. It provides the set of commands to make backup and restore operations in your database.

The following example illustrates how to use Percona Backup for MongoDB.

For example, imagine your web application’s update was released on February 2nd 23:00 EDT but, by 11:23 the next day, someone realizes that the update has a bug that is wiping the historical data of any user who logged in. Nobody likes to have downtime, but it’s time to roll back: what’s the best backup to use?

$ pbm list

Output

Backup snapshots:
  2021-02-03T08:08:15Z [complete: 2021-02-03T08:08:35]
  2021-02-05T13:55:55Z [complete: 2021-02-05T13:56:15]
  2021-02-07T13:57:58Z [complete: 2021-02-07T13:58:17]
  2021-02-09T14:06:06Z [complete: 2021-02-09T14:06:26]
  2021-02-11T14:22:41Z [complete: 2021-02-11T14:23:01]

The most recent daily backup is 09:22 EDT (14:22 UTC), which would include 4 hours of damage caused by the bug. Let’s restore the one before that:

$ pbm restore 2021-02-09T14:06:06Z

To be on the safe side, it might be best to make an extra backup manually before the next application release:

$ pbm backup

Find the full set of commands available in Percona Backup for MongoDB in pbm commands.