Warning: Warning: Avoid using mongoimport and mongoexport for full instance production backups. They do not reliably preserve all rich BSON data types, because JSON can only represent a subset of the types supported by BSON. Use mongodump and mongorestore as described in MongoDB Backup Methods (page 184) for this kind of functionality. Collection Export with mongoexport Chapter 5. Administration 252 MongoDB’s mongoimport and mongoexport tools allow you to work with your data in a human-readable Extended JSON or CSV format. This is useful for simple ingestion to or from a third-party system, and when you want to backup or export a small subset of your data. For more complex data migration tasks, you may want to write your own import and export scripts using a client driver to interact with the database. The examples in this section use the MongoDB tools mongoimport and mongoexport . These tools may also be useful for importing data into a MongoDB database from third party applications. If you want to simply copy a database or collection from one instance to another, consider using the copydb , clone , or cloneCollection commands, which may be more suited to this task. The mongo shell provides the db.copyDatabase() method. As above, you may specify username and password connections if your mongod requires authentication. mongorestore --host mongodb1.example.net --port 3017 --username user --password pass Consider the following example: Restore Backups to Non-Local mongod Instances By default, mongorestore connects to a MongoDB instance running on the localhost interface (e.g. 127.0.0.1 ) and on the default port ( 27017 ). If you want to restore to a different host or port, use the --host and --port options. You may also consider using the mongorestore --objcheck option to check the integrity of objects while inserting them into the database, or you may consider the mongorestore --drop option to drop each collection from the database before restoring from backups. mongorestore --oplogReplay Restore Point in Time Oplog Backup If you created your database dump using the --oplog option to ensure a point-in-time snapshot, call mongorestore with the --oplogReplay option, as in the following example: Here, mongorestore imports the database backup in the dump-2013-10-25 directory to the mongod instance running on the localhost interface. mongorestore dump-2013-10-25/ Consider the following example: mongorestore --port <port number> <path to the backup> MongoDB Documentation, Release 3.0.4 Human Intelligible Import/Export Formats