MongoDB backup plan

Question

I want to switch from MySQL to MongoDB but great data losses (more than 1 hour) are not acceptable for me.

I need to have 3 backup plans:

1. Hourly backup plan. Data is flushed to disk every X minutes and if something wrong with the server I shall be sure that after reboot it will have all data at least for an hour ago. Can I configure it?

2. Daily backup plan. Data is synced to backup disk every day so even if server explodes I can recover data for yesterday in some hours. Should I use fsync, master-slave or something else? I would like to have minimal traffic so ideally only changes will be sent.

3. Weekly backup plan. Data is synced to second backup disk so if both server and first backup disk explode I have at least data for last week. Here this is the question of reliability so it's ok to send all data via network.

How can I do it?

Answer 1

1. The fsync command flushes the data to disk. It is executed each 60 seconds by default, but can be configured using the --syncdelay command line parameter.

2. The documentation on backups has some good pointers for daily and weekly backups. For the daily backup, a master-slave configuration seems like the best option, as it will only sync changes.

3. For the weekly backup you can also use a master-slave configuration, or replication. Another option is the mongodump utility, which will back-up the entire database. It is capable of creating backups while the database is running, so you can run it on the main database or one of the slaves. You can also lock the slave before backing it up.