Backups

This section describes breaking changes and deprecations for Neo4j backups.

From Neo4j 4.0, every database is backed up individually. Therefore, it is very important to plan your backup strategy for each of them. For more detailed information on designing an appropriate backup strategy for your setup, see Operations Manual 4.0 → Backup and restore.

From the 4.0 version onwards, a default Neo4j installation has two databases:

  • system, containing metadata on the DBMS and security configuration.

  • neo4j, the default database.

Use the --database option of the neo4j-admin backup command to specify the database to back up. For more information, see Operations Manual → Back up an online database.

The --name parameter has been removed. It was previously used to specify the last part of the path when using --backup-dir. The last part of the path is now inferred from the --database parameter, which specifies the database name on the server.

If you previously used --name for customizing the backup path, for example, by including a timestamp, you can now use --backup-dir instead.