Backup, restore and clone

Prerequisites

• You have created a MongoDB Flex instance.
  Check Create and manage instances for MongoDB Flex.

Introduction

Backup and restore is an essential feature to garuantee the SLAs of your service. STACKIT’s MongoDB Flex offers a wide variety of different backup and restore capabilities to help you achieve this goal. These are the features of the backup and restore capabilities:

• Backup, clone and restore all of your instances
• Point-in-time restore for the last 30 hours
• Snapshot retention to up for a year
• Up to 4 simple snapshots per day
• Simple snapshot retention up to five days
• Independent daily, weekly and monthly snapshots with individual retention times
• GFS backup scheme configurable
• Restoring and cloning to other instances in the same project
• All settings are accessible via the Portal, the CLI, Cloud Foundry and Terraform.

Backup

You can configure the backup settings to the needs of your business. STACKIT’s MongoDB Flex offers snapshots on a daily, weekly and monthly base and furthermore saves transaction logs. The latter gives you the chance to restore to an arbitrary point in time within the point in time window of 30 hours. Daily, weekly, monthly and simple snapshot retention times can be configured independently.

You don’t pay for the backup itself, but for the storage the generated backup files reserve. The storage size depends on your backup settings and of the accumulated instance databases size. At the moment, you need to estimate the storage need by yourself.

Backup settings and their description

Setting	Description	Options
Backup Schedule	Defines how often on every day a backup is created	6, 8, 12, 24 hours
Simple snapshot retention	Number of days to retain backups	2, 3, 4, 5 days
Daily snapshot retention	Whether daily backups are created and if yes, for how long they are kept	None, 3 - 360 days
Weekly snapshot retention	Whether weekly backups are created and if yes, for how long they are kept	None, 1 - 52 weeks
Monthly snapshot retention	Whether monthly backups are created and if yes, for how long they are kept	None, 1 - 12 months
Point in time window	Time window in the past for which transaction logs are kept	30 hours

With the snapshot retention setting, you define the number of days for which every backup is kept. Whereas with daily snapshot retention, you independently define how long one backup for each day is kept.

View backup settings

You can get an overview of the current backup settings of an instance.

STACKIT CLI

Flag	Description
instance-id	Instance ID of the instance you want to query

stackit mongodbflex backup schedule --instance-id <instance-id>

You get an output like this:

 BACKUP SCHEDULE (UTC)               │ 39 10/8 * * *
─────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────
 DAILY SNAPSHOT RETENTION (DAYS)     │ 0
─────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────
 MONTHLY SNAPSHOT RETENTION (MONTHS) │
─────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────
 POINT IN TIME WINDOW (HOURS)        │ 30
─────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────
 SNAPSHOT RETENTION (DAYS)           │ 3
─────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────
 WEEKLY SNAPSHOT RETENTION (WEEKS)   │ 3

BACKUP SCHEDULE (UTC) is the representation for the Backup Schedule setting. It follows the cron format. The important number is behind the slash and reflects if a backup is run either every 6, 8, 12 or 24 hours. DAILY SNAPSHOT RETENTION (DAYS), WEEKLY SNAPSHOT RETENTION (WEEKS)and MONTHLY SNAPSHOT RETENTION (MONTHS) corresond to Daily Snapshot Retention, Weekly Snapshot Retention and Monthly Snapshot Retention. SNAPSHOT RETENTION (DAYS) represents Snapshot Retention (simple snapshots). The POINT IN TIME WINDOW (HOURS) shows the amount of time for which you can restore to a specific point in time. From a technical standpoint it represents the length of the transaction log.

STACKIT Portal

You can view the backup settings by navigating to the Backups tab at the dashboard of your instance and clicking the schedule button on the top right side.

1. Navigate to Databases > Mongo DB Flex.

2. Select your MongoDB Flex instance and go to Backup.

3. On the top right corner, click on Schedule.

4. Set everything to your needs. See Backup settings and their description for the meaning of every setting.

5. To leave the pane, click on Cancel.

Modify backup settings

You can modify your backup schedule to adapt the backup to your needs.

STACKIT CLI

Flag	Description
instance-id	Instance ID of the instance you want to query
schedule	See Backup settings and their description
store-for-days	See Backup settings and their description
store-daily-backup-days	See Backup settings and their description
store-daily-backup-weeks	See Backup settings and their description
store-daily-backup-months	See Backup settings and their description

stackit mongodbflex update-backup schedule --instance-id <instance-id> --schedule <schedule> --store-for-days <store-for-days> --store-daily-backup-days <daily-backup-days> --store-weekly-backup-weeks <weekly-backup-weeks> --store-monthly-backups-months <monthly-backup-months>

STACKIT Portal

You can configure the backup settings by navigating to the Backups tab at the service dashboard of your instance and clicking the schedule button on the top right side.

1. Navigate to Databases > Mongo DB Flex.

2. Select your MongoDB Flex instance and go to Backup.

3. On the top right corner, click on Schedule.

4. Set everything to your needs. See Backup settings and their description for the meaning of every setting.

5. To confirm, click on Save.

List existing backups

You can have an overview of the existing backups.

STACKIT CLI

Flag	Description
instance-id	Instance ID of the instance you want to query

stackit mongodbflex list --instance-id <instance-id>

You get something like this:

 ID                       │ CREATED AT           │ EXPIRES AT           │ BACKUP SIZE │ RESTORE STATUS
──────────────────────────┼──────────────────────┼──────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────
 689190e5481e264f2594fbf2 │ 2025-08-05T05:02:45Z │ 2025-08-08T05:01:00Z │ 2.57MB      │ -
 68913ca485a6c1739e430cd8 │ 2025-08-04T23:03:44Z │ 2025-08-07T23:01:00Z │ 2.57MB      │ -
 6890e8175d9e7576ae47710b │ 2025-08-04T17:02:33Z │ 2025-08-07T17:01:00Z │ 2.57MB      │ -

The timestamps are in UTC.

After a backup is expired, you cannot restore it.

STACKIT Portal

You can get a list of existing backups by navigating to the Backups tab at the dashboard of your instance.

1. Navigate to Databases > Mongo DB Flex.

2. Select your MongoDB Flex instance and go to Backup.

3. Now you can see every available backup.

   The timestamps are in UTC.

Restore

You can restore a specific backup either to the same instance or to another instance within the same STACKIT project. You can do a point-in-time restore or restore a specific backup with its ID.

STACKIT CLI

Flag	Description	Optional
instance-id	Instance ID of the instance you want to query
timestamp	Timestamp as of RFC3339 for point-in-time recovery	if backup-id is specified
backup-id	ID of existing backup. See List existing backups to get available backups	if timestamp is specified
backup-instance-id	ID of the target instance	x

If you omit the backup-instance-id-flag, the backup will be restored to the same instance which you specified with instance-id. You can do a point-in-time restore to another target instance.

stackit mongodbflex restore --instance-id <instance-id> --timestamp <timestamp> --backup-id <backup-id> --backup-instance-id <backup-instance-id>

Examples

stackit mongodbflex backup restore --instance-id yyy --timestamp 2024-05-14T14:31:48Z

stackit mongodbflex backup restore --instance-id zzz --backup-instance-id yyy --backup-id xxx

STACKIT Portal

You can do a restore by navigating to the Backups tab at the service dashboard of your instance and clicking the options button on the right side of the selected backup.

1. Navigate to Databases > Mongo DB Flex.

2. Select your MongoDB Flex instance and go to Backup.

3. Choose Restore.

4. Select if you want to restore to the current instance or to another one within your STACKIT project.

5. If you choose to restore to another instance, select it from the dropdown menu and confirm with the Restore button.

6. Monitor the progress with the Restore status column.

Clone

You can clone the backup with a point-in-time restore either to the same instance or to another instance within the same STACKIT project.

The point-in-time is fixed set to the current time, when you click on clone.

STACKIT Portal

You can do a clone by navigating to the Backups tab at the service dashboard of your instance and clicking the Options button on the right side of the selected backup.

1. Navigate to Databases > Mongo DB Flex.

2. Select your MongoDB Flex instance and go to Backup.

3. Choose Clone.

4. Select the target instance from the dropdown menu and confirm with the Clone button.

5. Monitor the progress with the Restore status column.