Hi All,
How are you doing?
Suppose you’ve been working with MongoDB for awhile now. In that case, you might know that back in the day when MMAPv1 was a supported storage engine, you could backup a database folder just by copying its files to a different location. If you need to restore any data, you only had to point a mongod process to the folder with your copied files and voilá … query your deleted documents and copy them back to your production database.
Then, WT became the default storage engine, and a few years later, MMAPv1 got deprecated. With WT, you can’t copy a database folder and do the same thing you could do with MMAPv1. We know WT brings a lot of other features missing by MMAPv1, but the simple backup/restore feature is a big deal.
A JIRA ticket was created in 2016 requesting that feature for WT (https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-23573), and after years MongoDB worked on it, and it will be available in MongoDB 6.0 \o/, but only in Enterprise Advanced. 
I wish the backup/restore of individual databases/collections could be available in Community because it was there in the past after all. It wasn’t a request for a new feature, but a request to put back a critical feature that was gone when the MMAPv1 got deprecated.
What do you think about it? I would love to hear your thoughts and if this is something important/critical for your operation perhaps we can bring it to MongoDB’s attention.
All the best,
– Rodrigo