12.7. Dump and load databases

This section describes the dump and load commands of Neo4j Admin.

A Neo4j database can be dumped and loaded using the following commands:

neo4j-admin dump --database=<database> --to=<destination-path>

neo4j-admin load --from=<archive-path> --database=<database> [--force]

Limitations

The database should be shutdown before running the dump and load commands.
neo4j-admin must be invoked as the neo4j user in order to ensure the appropriate file permissions.

Examples of usage

Moving databases from one environment to another.

Using the dump and load commands is the recommended, and safe, way of transferring databases between environments. They understand which files need to be exported and imported and which should not.

By contrast, file system copy-and-paste of databases is not supported.
Offline backups.

For a discussion of online versus offline backups, see Section 7.1.2, “Online and offline backups”.

Examples

Example 12.14. Use the dump command of neo4j-admin

Dump the database called graph.db into a file called /backups/graph.db/2016-10-02.dump. The destination directory for the dump file — in this case /backups/graph.db — must exist before calling the command.

$neo4j-home> bin/neo4j-admin dump --database=graph.db --to=/backups/graph.db/2016-10-02.dump

$neo4j-home> ls /backups/graph.db

$neo4j-home> 2016-10-02.dump

Example 12.15. Use the load command of neo4j-admin

Load the backed-up database contained in the file /backups/graph.db/2016-10-02.dump into database graph.db. Since we have a database running, we first have to shut it down. When we use the --force option, any existing database gets overwritten.

$neo4j-home> bin/neo4j stop

Stopping Neo4j.. stopped

$neo4j-home> bin/neo4j-admin load --from=/backups/graph.db/2016-10-02.dump --database=graph.db --force

If using the load command to seed a Causal Cluster, you must first perform neo4j-admin unbind on each of the cluster instances. The procedure is described in Section 5.3.3, “Seed from an offline backup”.