Avoid Vendor Lock-in with Percona Backup for MongoDB

v1 is the first GA version of our new MongoDB backup tool. This has been custom-built to assist those users who don’t want to pay for MongoDB Enterprise and Ops Manager but do want a fully-supported community backup tool that can perform cluster-wide consistent backups in MongoDB.

Please visit ourwebpage to download the latest version of this software.

In a nutshell, what can it do?

Currently, Percona Backup for MongoDB is designed to give you an easy command-line interface which allows you to perform a consistent backup/restore of clusters and non-sharded replica sets. It uses S3 (or S3-compatible) object storage for the remote store. Percona Backup for MongoDB can improve your cluster backup consistency compared to the filesystem snapshot method, and can save you time and effort if you are implementing MongoDB backups for the first time.

Why did we create Percona Backup for MongoDB?

Many people in the community and within our customer base told us that they wanted a tool that could easily back up and restore clusters. This feature was something they felt “locked” them into MongoDB’s enterprise subscription.

Percona is anti-vendor-lock-in and strives to create and provide tools, software, and services to help our customers achieve the freedom they need to use, manage, and move their data easily. We will continue to develop and add new features to Percona Backup for MongoDB, enabling users to have more freedom of choice when selecting a backup software provider.

Couldn’t I do all this myself?

It is possible to build your own scripts and tools which enable you to perform consistent backups across a cluster; in fact, many in the community have done this. But, not all users and enterprises have the technical skill or knowledge required to build something that they can feel confident will consistently back up their databases. Many users are looking for a fully-supported, community-driven tool to fill in the gaps. This is especially important given the steady evolution of MongoDB’s replication and sharding protocols. Keeping up with new features and code can be challenging for DBAs, who usually also have a range of additional responsibilities to meet.

What other features are coming in the future?

Percona Backup for MongoDB v1 met the original goal laid out by the community; to create a tool that can create a consistent backup for clusters as easily as mongodump does for a non-sharded single replica set. On top of that the restore is as simple as “pbm list” + “pbm restore <backup-you-want>”.

However, there is still a lot more we plan to do in order to extend and enhance this tool. Our short-term feature roadmap includes:

• Point in time restores
• Better User Interface: Additional Status and Logging
• Distributed transaction handling

Help us make it better!

We would love your help in making this tool even better! Yes, we accept code contributions. We know many of you have already solved tricky issues around backup in MongoDB and would appreciate any contributions you have which would improve Percona Backup for MongoDB. We would also love to hear what features you think we need to include in future versions.

For more details on our commitment to MongoDB and our latest software, please visit ourwebsite.