Validate a sharded property database backup
Enterprise EditionNot available on AuraIntroduced in 2025.12

When you back up a sharded property database, you create multiple backup chains—one for each shard. The backup chains of the graph shard will have 1 full backup and 0 or more differential backups. Whereas the property shard backup chains will have only 1 full backup, differential backups of property shards are not supported. See Backup and restore for more information on backing up sharded property databases.

To ensure that the backup chains are valid and can be used for restoration, you can use the neo4j-admin backup validate command.

Command

The neo4j-admin backup validate command checks the integrity and consistency of the backup artifacts for a specified sharded property database.

Syntax

neo4j-admin backup validate [-h] [--expand-commands] [--verbose]
                            [--additional-config=<file>] --database=<database>
                            [--format=<value>] --from-path=<backup-path>

Description

Command to validate a collection of backups.

Options

Table 1. neo4j-admin backup validate options
Option Description Default

--additional-config=<file>[1]

Configuration file with additional configuration.

--database=<database>

Name of the database to validate.

--expand-commands

Allow command expansion in config value evaluation.

--format=<value>

Format of the output of the command. Possible values are: 'JSON, TABULAR'.

TABULAR

--from-path=<backup-path>

Path denoting a directory to where backups are stored.

-h, --help

Show this help message and exit.

--verbose

Enable verbose output.
1. See Neo4j Admin and Neo4j CLI → Configuration for details.

Example

To validate a backup for the database foo located at s3://bucket/backups, use the following command:

bin/neo4j-admin backup validate "foo" --from-path=s3://bucket/backups

The output will indicate whether the backups are valid. For example:

| DATABASE |                                                PATH | STATUS |
| foo-g000 | /bucket/backups/foo-g000-2025-06-11T21-04-42.backup |     OK |
| foo-p000 | /bucket/backups/foo-p000-2025-06-11T21-04-37.backup |     OK |
| foo-p001 | /bucket/backups/foo-p001-2025-06-11T21-04-40.backup |     OK |

If valid, the backups can be used to seed a sharded property database.

For more examples and details, see Backup and restore.