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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.

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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.

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Scheduled backups

Scheduled backups require X-Pinecone-API-Version: unstable.
Instead of creating backups manually, you can define a recurring backup schedule that runs automatically. Each schedule includes:
  • Frequency: Backups can run daily, weekly, or monthly.
  • Retention: A required expiration policy (expire_after_days) that automatically deletes old backups, keeping storage costs predictable.
Each index supports one active schedule at a time. Backups created by a schedule are automatically named {name}-{ISO8601_timestamp}. For example, to create a daily backup that expires after 7 days: 
curl -sS -X POST "https://api.pinecone.io/indexes/${INDEX_NAME}/backup-schedules" \
  -H "api-key: ${PINECONE_API_KEY}" \
  -H "X-Pinecone-API-Version: unstable" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "my-nightly-backup",
    "schedule": {
      "type": "time-based",
      "frequency": "daily"
    },
    "retention": {
      "expire_after_days": 7
    }
  }'
Deleting a schedule does not delete any backups that were previously created by it. If you delete an index, all associated schedules are automatically deleted. For more details, see the API reference:

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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.

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Quotas

MetricStarter planBuilder planStandard planEnterprise plan
Backups per projectN/AN/A5001000
Backups are not available on the Starter or Builder plans. To create backups, upgrade to the Standard or Enterprise plan.

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Limitations

Backup limitations are as follows:
  • Backups are stored in the same project, cloud provider, and region as the source index.
  • You can only restore an index to the same project, cloud provider, and 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.
  • Backups are supported for indexes without a schema definition and for integrated embedding indexes that use the records API. They are not supported for full-text search indexes with document schemas that include full_text_search string fields, dense_vector fields, or sparse_vector fields. Indexes with document schemas also do not support semantic_text fields.

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Backup and restore cost

  • To understand how cost is calculated for backups and restores, see Understanding cost.
  • For up-to-date pricing information, see Pricing.