Customers who sign up for a Standard or Enterprise plan on or after August 18, 2025 cannot create pod-based indexes. Instead, create serverless indexes, and consider using dedicated read nodes for large workloads (millions of records or more, and moderate or high query rates).
A collection is a static copy of a pod-based index that only consumes storage. It is a non-queryable representation of a set of records. You can create a collection of a pod-based index, and you can create a new pod-based index from a collection. This allows you to restore the index with the same or different configurations.
Once a collection is created, it cannot be moved to a different project.

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Use cases

Creating a collection is useful when performing tasks like the following:
  • Protecting an index from manual or system failures.
  • Temporarily shutting down an index.
  • Copying the data from one index into a different index.
  • Making a backup of your index.
  • Experimenting with different index configurations.

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Performance

Collections operations perform differently, depending on the pod type of the index:
  • Creating a p1 or s1 index from a collection takes approximately 10 minutes.
  • Creating a p2 index from a collection can take several hours when the number of vectors is on the order of 1,000,000.

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Limitations

Collection limitations are as follows:
  • You can only perform operations on collections in the current Pinecone project.

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Pricing

See Pricing for up-to-date pricing information.