Make a physical backup

Before you start

1. Install and set up Percona Backup for MongoDB
2. Check that pbm agent is running with the pbm status command

3. Check that all pbm-agents and PBM CLI have the same version. Otherwise we cannot guarantee successful backups and data consistency in them.

   To check the version, run the following commands:

   • pbm status to check the version of pbm-agents
   • pbm version to check the version of PBM CLI.

Procedure

Version added: 1.7.0

During a physical backup, Percona Backup for MongoDB copies the contents of the dbpath directory (data and metadata files, indexes, journal and logs) from every shard and config server replica set to the backup storage.

To start a backup, run the following command:

$ pbm backup --type=physical

Warning

During the period the backup cursor is open, database checkpoints can be created, but no checkpoints can be deleted. This may result in significant file growth.

Starting with 2.4.0, PBM doesn’t stop point-in-time recovery oplog slicing, if it’s enabled, but runs it in parallel. This ensures point-in-time recovery to any timestamp if it takes too long (e.g. hours) to make a backup snapshot.

Next steps

List backups Make a restore Make a point-in-time recovery

Useful links

• Backup and restore types
• Schedule backups

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Last update: April 11, 2025
Created: April 11, 2025