A “backup” is a static copy of a serverless index.

A “collection” is a static copy of a pod-based index.

A backup or collection is a static copy of your index that only consumes storage. It is a non-queryable representation of a set of records. You can create a backup or collection of an index, and you can create a new index from a backup or collection. This allows you to restore the index with the same or different configurations.

Serverless index backups are in public preview and available only on Standard and Enterprise plans.

​
Use cases

Creating a backup or 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

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.

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

Backup limitations are as follows:

  • Backups can be created only for serverless indexes with up to 100,000,000 vectors or 1,000 namespaces.
  • There is a quota of 5 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.

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.

Was this page helpful?

View index informationBack up an index