Back up an offline database

Remember to plan your backup carefully and to back up each of your databases, including the system database.

Command

A Neo4j database can be backed up in offline mode using the dump command of neo4j-admin.

Usage

The neo4j-admin dump command can be used for performing a full backup of an offline database. It dumps a database into a single-file archive, called <database>.dump. Alternatively, neo4j-admin dump can stream dump to standard output, enabling the output to be piped to another program, for example to neo4j-admin load.

The command can be run only locally from an online or an offline Neo4j DBMS.

It does not support SSL/TLS.

Syntax

neo4j-admin dump --to=<destination-path>
                [--verbose]
                [--expand-commands]
                [--database=<database>]

Options

Option Default Description

--to

Destination (file or folder) of database dump, or - for standard output.

--verbose

Enable verbose output.

--expand-commands

Allow command expansion in config value evaluation.

--database

neo4j

Name of the database to dump.

Example

The following is an example of how to create a dump of the default database neo4j, called neo4j-<timestamp>.dump, using the neo4j-admin dump command. The target directory /dumps/neo4j must exist before running the command and the database must be offline.

bin/neo4j-admin dump --database=neo4j --to=/dumps/neo4j/neo4j-<timestamp>.dump

neo4j-admin dump cannot be applied to the Fabric virtual database. It must be run directly on the databases that are part of the Fabric setup.