Back up an online database
Remember to plan your backup carefully and to back up each of your databases, including the |
Command
A Neo4j database can be backed up in online mode using the backup
command of neo4j-admin
.
The command must be invoked as the neo4j
user to ensure the appropriate file permissions.
Neo4j v5.0 introduces a new version of the backup command which produces immutable backup artifacts (as opposed to mutable folders as in previous versions). |
Backup artifact
The neo4j-admin database backup
command produces one backup artifact file per database each time it is run.
A backup artifact file is an immutable file containing the backup data of a given database along with some metadata like the database name and id, the backup time, the lowest/highest transaction id etc.
Backup artifacts can be of two types:
-
a full backup containing the whole database store or
-
a differential backup containing a log of transactions to apply to a database store contained in a full backup artifact.
Backup chain
The first time the backup command is run, a full backup artifact is produced for a given database. On the other hand, differential backup artifacts are produced by the subsequent runs.
A backup chain consists of a full backup optionally followed by a sequence of n contiguous differential backups.

Usage
The neo4j-admin database backup
command can be used for performing both full and differential backups of an online database.
The command can be run both locally and remotely.
However, it uses a significant amount of resources, such as memory and CPU.
Therefore, it is recommended to perform the backup on a separate dedicated machine.
The neo4j-admin database backup
command also supports SSL/TLS.
For more information, see Online backup configurations.
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Syntax
neo4j-admin database backup --to-path=<path>
[--from=<host:port>[,<host:port>]...]
[--type=<type>]
[--compress=<true/false>]
[--keep-failed=<true/false>]
[--pagecache=<size>]
[--include-metadata=<all/users/roles>]
[--parallel-recovery=<true/false>]
[--inspect-path=<path>]
[--verbose]
[--expand-commands]
[--additional-config=<path>]
<database>
Options
Option | Default | Description | ||
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Directory to place backup in. |
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Comma-separated list of host and port of Neo4j instances, each of which are tried in order. |
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Type of backup to perform. Possible values are: |
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Request backup artifact to be compressed. If disabled, backup artifact creation is faster but the size of the produced artifact is approximately equal to the size of backed-up database. |
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Request failed backup to be preserved for further post-failure analysis. If enabled, a directory with the failed backup database is preserved. |
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The size of the page cache to use for the backup process. |
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Include metadata in the backup.
Metadata contains security settings related to the database.
Cannot be used for backing up the
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Allow multiple threads to apply transactions to a backup in parallel. For some databases and workloads, this may reduce execution times significantly.
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List and show the metadata of the backup artifact(s). Accepts a folder or a file. |
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Enable verbose output. |
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Allow command expansion in config value evaluation. |
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Configuration file to provide additional or override the existing configuration settings in the neo4j.conf file. |
Parameters
Parameter | Default | Description | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
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Name of the remote database to back up. The value can contain
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Exit codes
Depending on whether the backup was successful or not, neo4j-admin database backup
exits with different codes.
The error codes include details of what error was encountered.
Code | Description |
---|---|
|
Success. |
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Backup failed, or succeeded but encountered problems such as some servers being uncontactable. See logs for more details. |
Code | Description |
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|
All databases are backed up successfully. |
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One or several backups failed, or succeeded with problems. |
Online backup configurations
Server configuration
The table below lists the basic server parameters relevant to backups. Note that by default, the backup service is enabled but only listens on localhost (127.0.0.1). This needs to be changed if backups are to be taken from another machine.
Parameter name | Default value | Description |
---|---|---|
|
Enable support for running online backups. |
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|
Listening server for online backups. |
Memory configuration
The following options are available for configuring the memory allocated to the backup client:
-
Configure heap size for the backup::
HEAP_SIZE
configures the maximum heap size allocated for the backup process.
This is done by setting the environment variable HEAP_SIZE
before starting the operation.
If not specified, the Java Virtual Machine chooses a value based on the server resources.
-
Configure page cache for the backup::
The page cache size can be configured by using the --pagecache
option of the neo4j-admin database backup
command.
You should give the Neo4J page cache as much memory as possible, as long as it satisfies the following constraint: Neo4J page cache + OS page cache < available RAM, where 2 to 4GB should be dedicated to the operating system’s page cache. For example, if your current database has a |
Computational resources configurations
- Transaction log files
-
The transaction log files, which keep track of recent changes, are rotated and pruned based on a provided configuration. For example, setting
db.tx_log.rotation.retention_policy=3
files keeps 3 transaction log files in the backup. Because recovered servers do not need all of the transaction log files that have already been applied, it is possible to further reduce storage size by reducing the size of the files to the bare minimum. This can be done by settingdb.tx_log.rotation.size=1M
anddb.tx_log.rotation.retention_policy=3
files. You can use the--additional-config
parameter to override the configurations in the neo4j.conf file.Removing transaction logs manually can result in a broken backup.
Security configurations
Securing your backup network communication with an SSL policy and a firewall protects your data from unwanted intrusion and leakage.
When using the neo4j-admin database backup
command, you can configure the backup server to require SSL/TLS, and the backup client to use a compatible policy.
For more information on how to configure SSL in Neo4j, see SSL framework.
The default backup port is 6362, configured with key server.backup.listen_address
.
The SSL configuration policy has the key of dbms.ssl.policy.backup
.
As an example, add the following content to your neo4j.conf file:
dbms.ssl.policy.backup.enabled=true
dbms.ssl.policy.backup.tls_versions=TLSv1.2
dbms.ssl.policy.backup.ciphers=TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384
dbms.ssl.policy.backup.client_auth=REQUIRE
For a detailed list of recommendations regarding security in Neo4j, see Security checklist. |
It is very important to ensure that there is no external access to the port specified by the setting |
Cluster configurations
In a cluster topology, it is possible to take a backup from any server hosting the database to backup, and each server has two configurable ports capable of serving a backup.
These ports are configured by server.backup.listen_address
and server.cluster.listen_address
respectively.
Functionally, they are equivalent for backups, but separating them can allow some operational flexibility, while using just a single port can simplify the configuration.
It is generally recommended to select secondary servers to act as backup servers, since they are more numerous than primary servers in typical cluster deployments.
Furthermore, the possibility of performance issues on a secondary server, caused by a large backup, does not affect the performance or redundancy of the primary servers.
If a secondary server is not available, then a primary can be selected based on factors, such as its physical proximity, bandwidth, performance, and liveness.
Use the |
To avoid taking a backup from a cluster member that is lagging behind, you can look at the transaction IDs by exposing Neo4j metrics or via Neo4j Browser.
To view the latest processed transaction IDs (and other metrics) in Neo4j Browser, type |
Targeting multiple servers
It is recommended to provide a list of multiple target servers when taking a backup from a cluster, since that may allow a backup to succeed even if some server is down, or not all databases are hosted on the same servers. If the command finds one or more servers that do not respond, it continues trying to backup from other servers, and continue backing up other requested databases, but the exit code of the command is non-zero, to alert the user to the fact there is a problem. If a name pattern is used for the database together with multiple target servers, all servers contribute to the list of matching databases.
Examples
The following are examples of how to back up a single database, e.g., the default database neo4j
, and multiple databases, using the neo4j-admin database backup
command.
The target directory /mnt/backups/neo4j must exist before calling the command and the database(s) must be online.
neo4j-admin database backup
to back up a single database.bin/neo4j-admin database backup --to-path=/mnt/backups/neo4j neo4j
To backup several databases that match database pattern you can use name globbing. For example, to backup all databases that start with n from your three-node cluster you should run:
neo4j-admin database backup
to back up multiple databases.neo4j-admin database backup --from=192.168.1.34:6362,192.168.1.35:6362,192.168.1.36:6362 --to-path=/mnt/backups/neo4j --pagecache=4G "n*"
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