Title: Restoring single objects in mongodb
Author: Alex Kirk
Published: May 31, 2011

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# Restoring single objects in mongodb

May 31, 2011

Today I had the need to restore single objects from a [mongodb](http://www.mongodb.org/)
installation. mongodb offers two tools for this mongodump and mongorestore, both
of which seem to be designed to **only dump and restore whole collections**.

So I’ll demonstrate the workflow just to restore a bunch of objects. Maybe it’s 
a clumsy way, but we’ll improve this over time.

So, we have an existing backup, done with mongodump (for example through a daily,
over-night backup). This consists of several .bson files, one for each collection.

 1. Restore a whole collection to a new database: mongorestore -d newdb collection.
    bson
 2. Open this database: mongo newdb
 3. Find the items you want to restore through a query, for example: db.collection.
    find({"_id": {"$gte": ObjectId("4da4231c747359d16c370000")}});
 4. Back on the command line again, just dump these lines to a new bson file: mongodump-
    d newdb -c collection -q '{"_id": {"$gte": ObjectId("4da4231c747359d16c370000")}}'
 5. Now you can finally import just those objects into your existing collection: mongorestore-
    d realdb collection.bson

[Code](https://alex.kirk.at/category/code/), [Mongodb](https://alex.kirk.at/category/code/mongodb/)

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