tar gzip mongo dump like MySQL

Question

Is there anyway to tar gzip mongo dumps like you can do with MySQL dumps?

For example, for mysqldumps, you can write a command as such:

mysqldump -u <username> --password=<password> --all-databases | gzip > all-databases.`date +%F`.gz 

Is there an equivalent way to do the same for mongo dumps?

For mongo dumps I run this command:

mongodump --host localhost --out /backup 

Is there a way to just pipe that to gzip? I tried, but that didn't work.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Version 3.2 introduced gzip and archive option:

mongodump --db <yourdb> --gzip --archive=/path/to/archive

Then you can restore with:

mongorestore --gzip --archive=/path/to/archive

Answer 2

Update (July 2015): TOOLS-675 is now marked as complete, which will allow for dumping to an archive format in 3.2 and gzip will be one of the options in the 3.2 versions of the mongodump/mongorestore tools. I will update with the relevant docs once they are live for 3.2

Original answer (3.0 and below):

You can do this with a single collection by outputting mongodump to stdout, then piping it to a compression program (gzip, bzip2) but you will only get data (no index information) and you cannot do it for a full database (multiple collections) for now. The relevant feature request for this functionality is SERVER-5190 for upvoting/watching purposes.

Here is a quick sample run through of what is possible, using bzip2 in this example:

./mongo MongoDB shell version: 2.6.1 connecting to: test > db.foo.find() { "_id" : ObjectId("53ad8a3eb74b5ae2ff0ec93a"), "a" : 1 } { "_id" : ObjectId("53ad8ba445be9c4f7bd018b4"), "a" : 2 } { "_id" : ObjectId("53ad8ba645be9c4f7bd018b5"), "a" : 3 } { "_id" : ObjectId("53ad8ba845be9c4f7bd018b6"), "a" : 4 } { "_id" : ObjectId("53ad8baa45be9c4f7bd018b7"), "a" : 5 } >  bye $ ./mongodump -d test -c foo -o - | bzip2 - > foo.bson.bz2 connected to: 127.0.0.1 $ bunzip2 foo.bson.bz2  $ ./bsondump foo.bson { "_id" : ObjectId( "53ad8a3eb74b5ae2ff0ec93a" ), "a" : 1 } { "_id" : ObjectId( "53ad8ba445be9c4f7bd018b4" ), "a" : 2 } { "_id" : ObjectId( "53ad8ba645be9c4f7bd018b5" ), "a" : 3 } { "_id" : ObjectId( "53ad8ba845be9c4f7bd018b6" ), "a" : 4 } { "_id" : ObjectId( "53ad8baa45be9c4f7bd018b7" ), "a" : 5 } 5 objects found 

Compare that with a straight mongodump (you get the same foo.bson but the extra foo.metadata.json describing the indexes is not included above):

$ ./mongodump -d test -c foo -o . connected to: 127.0.0.1 2014-06-27T16:24:20.802+0100 DATABASE: test  to     ./test 2014-06-27T16:24:20.802+0100    test.foo to ./test/foo.bson 2014-06-27T16:24:20.802+0100         5 documents 2014-06-27T16:24:20.802+0100    Metadata for test.foo to ./test/foo.metadata.json $ ./bsondump test/foo.bson  { "_id" : ObjectId( "53ad8a3eb74b5ae2ff0ec93a" ), "a" : 1 } { "_id" : ObjectId( "53ad8ba445be9c4f7bd018b4" ), "a" : 2 } { "_id" : ObjectId( "53ad8ba645be9c4f7bd018b5" ), "a" : 3 } { "_id" : ObjectId( "53ad8ba845be9c4f7bd018b6" ), "a" : 4 } { "_id" : ObjectId( "53ad8baa45be9c4f7bd018b7" ), "a" : 5 } 5 objects found