Back up and restore
Understanding backups
A backup is a static copy of a serverless index that only consumes storage. It is a non-queryable representation of a set of records. You can create a backup of a serverless index, and you can create a new serverless index from a backup. This allows you to restore the index with the same or different configurations.
Once a backup is created, it cannot be moved to a different project.
Serverless index backups are in public preview and available only on Standard and Enterprise plans.
Use cases
Creating a backup 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
Backup and restore times depend upon the size of the index and number of namespaces:
- For less than 1M vectors in a namespace, backups and restores take approximately 10 minutes.
- For 100,000,000 vectors, backups and restores can take up to 5 hours.
Limitations
Backup limitations are as follows:
- Backups can be created only for serverless indexes with up to 2,000 namespaces.
- There is a quota of 50 serverless backups per project.
- Backups are stored in the same region as the source index.
- You can only restore an index to the same region as the source index.
- Backups only include vectors that were in the index at least 15 minutes prior to the backup time. This means that if a vector was inserted into an index and a backup was immediately taken after, the recently inserted vector may not be backed up. More specifically, if a backup is created only a few minutes after the source index was created, the backup may have 0 vectors.
- You can only perform operations on backups in the current Pinecone project.
Pricing
See Pricing for up-to-date pricing information.
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