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. If the database is hosted in a cluster, make sure that the database is stopped on the server you are connected to.

Usage

The neo4j-admin database 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 database dump can stream dump to standard output, enabling the output to be piped to another program, for example to neo4j-admin database 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 database dump   [--verbose]
                            [--expand-commands]
                            [--overwrite-destination[=true|false]]
                            [--to-path=<path> | --to-stdout]
                            <database>

<database> —  Name of the database to dump. Can contain * and ? for globbing.

Options

Option Default Description

--verbose

Enable verbose output.

--expand-commands

Allow command expansion in config value evaluation.

--overwrite-destination

false

Overwrite any existing dump file in the destination folder.

--to-path

Destination for the database dump. It must point to an existing directory.

--to-stdout

Use standard output as the destination for the database dump.

Example

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

bin/neo4j-admin database dump neo4j --to-path=/dumps/neo4j

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