Back up and restore
Understanding collections
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.
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.
Performance
Collections operations perform differently, depending on the pod type of the index:
- Creating a
p1
ors1
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.
Limitations
Collection limitations are as follows:
- You can only perform operations on collections in the current Pinecone project.
Pricing
See Pricing for up-to-date pricing information.
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