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 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.

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.