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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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

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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.

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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.