Backups are copies of your data that encapsulate the state of your cluster at a given time. Backups provide a safety measure in the event of data loss. If you have strict data protection requirements, you can enable a Backup Compliance Policy to protect your backup data.
Required Access
To manage or restore backups for a cluster, you must have
Project Backup Manager or Project Owner access
to the project.
Users with Organization Owner
access must add themselves as a Project Backup Manager or
Project Owner to the project before they can manage or restore
backups.
Considerations
Be aware that:
Atlas backups are not available for
M0Free clusters. You may use mongodump to back up yourM0cluster data and mongorestore to restore that data. To learn how to manually back up your data, see Command Line Tools.You can't write to your cluster while a backup restore is in progress for that cluster.
You can restore a backup only to a cluster running either:
The same major release version with an equal or higher minor version. For example, if you create a backup for a cluster running MongoDB 8.1.x, you can restore this backup to a cluster running any other 8.1.x version, or any 8.y.x version where
y > 1, but you can't restore it to any 8.0.x version.The next higher major release version. For example, if you create a backup for a cluster running MongoDB 8.y.x, you can restore this backup to a cluster running 9.y.x, but you can't restore it to any 7.y.x version.
If the backup has a pinned FCV, the major version of the target cluster must match the major version of that pinned FCV.
Cloud Backups
Available in M10+ Clusters.
Atlas backups are immutable by default. Therefore, it is not possible to modify a snapshot. To enforce indelibility, you can enable a Backup Compliance Policy, which prevents all users from deleting backups or altering their retention settings, ensuring strict backup integrity.
Atlas supports Cloud Backups on:
To learn more, see Back Up Your Cluster.
To learn how to restore cluster from a Cloud Backup, see Restore from a Scheduled or On-Demand Snapshot.
Snapshots for Flex Clusters
Important
As of February 2025, you can create Flex clusters, and can no longer
create M2 and M5 clusters or Serverless instances in the
Atlas UI, Atlas CLI, Atlas Administration API, Atlas Kubernetes Operator, HashiCorp Terraform,
or Atlas CloudFormation Resources.
Atlas no longer supports M2 and M5 clusters and Serverless instances. As of May 25, 2025, Atlas has migrated all existing M2 and M5
clusters to Flex clusters.
Atlas migrated Serverless instances to Free clusters, Flex clusters, or Dedicated clusters according to your usage. To see which tiers Atlas migrated your instances to, consult the All Clusters page in the Atlas UI.
Backups are automatically enabled for Flex clusters and can't be disabled.
Atlas takes daily snapshots of your Flex clusters, which you can
restore to Flex cluster or M10 and greater tiers.
To learn more about backing up your cluster, see Flex Cluster Backups.
To learn more about restoring your cluster, see Restore from a Scheduled or On-Demand Snapshot.