Changing MongoDB data store directory

mongodb filepath data-files
Mark Gill picture Mark Gill · May 11, 2011 · Viewed 261.8k times · Source

Until now I have not been specifying a MongoDB data directory and have had only one 30 GB primary partition.

I just ran out of space and added a new hard disk. How can I transfer my data (that is apparently in /var/lib/mongodb/) and configure MongoDB so that everything runs off of the new disk without affecting my existing installation?

Answer

Brendan W. McAdams picture Brendan W. McAdams · May 11, 2011

The short answer is that the --dbpath parameter in MongoDB will allow you to control what directory MongoDB reads and writes it's data from.

mongod --dbpath /usr/local/mongodb-data

Would start mongodb and put the files in /usr/local/mongodb-data.

Depending on your distribution and MongoDB installation, you can also configure the mongod.conf file to do this automatically:

# Store data in /usr/local/var/mongodb instead of the default /data/db
dbpath = /usr/local/var/mongodb

The official 10gen Linux packages (Ubuntu/Debian or CentOS/Fedora) ship with a basic configuration file which is placed in /etc/mongodb.conf, and the MongoDB service reads this when it starts up. You could make your change here.

Related questions

How to query MongoDB with "like"?

I want to query something with SQL's like query: SELECT * FROM users WHERE name LIKE '%m%' How to do I achieve the same in MongoDB? I can't find an operator for like in the documentation.

Read More
Find objects between two dates MongoDB

I've been playing around storing tweets inside mongodb, each object looks like this: { "_id" : ObjectId("4c02c58de500fe1be1000005"), "contributors" : null, "text" : "Hello world", "user" : { "following" : null, "followers_count" : 5, "utc_offset" : null, "location" : "", "profile_text_color" : "000000", "friends_count" : 11, "profile_…

Read More
How can I list all collections in the MongoDB shell?

In the MongoDB shell, how do I list all collections for the current database that I'm using?

Read More