Mongo db partial back ups

Question

We have a 5 node replication set up on our development server. We are looking for a way to allow developers to back up a subset of data in a mongo db and restore this to their local development enviroments.

We have looked into the clonedb and the mongodump utils, but both only allow for a backup/dump of the complete database. Due to the possible size of the database, we need an option that allows us to limit the data being backed up or restored.

Do any know of a util or way to achieve this?

Answer 1

I just stumbled upon this question again and decided to add a description of our backup strategy we opt in for:

Current back up strategy for our mongo db this server consist of 2 setups; backup via delayed passive secondarynode and daily backup using mongodump (takes journalling and oplog into play).

Besides our normal production nodes, we have setup another secondary node with a priority of 0 (this can either be on its own server or piggy backing off another mongo server but using a seperate port), hidden as true and a delay of 7200 seconds (2hours). This slave is there for "butter fingers", when some one accidentally drops a database or clears a collection, we have 2 hours before these changes replicate to this passive secondary. The passive secondary can NOT be used for READING or WRITING. It's role is simply a back up node. We also use this node for nightly backup to prevent unnecessary overhead on any of the other nodes.

The nightly backup is set to run every night at 23:00 via a cron tab. The command simply executes a script setup in /opt/auto-mongo-backup. This script can be found at https://github.com/jaconel/automongobackup (originally found it at https://github.com/micahwedemeyer/automongobackup). This script allows for a single nightly cron to cover weekly backups and monthly backups. Back ups are saved at /var/backups/mongodb.

Hope this helps some one out.