arangodb/Documentation/ToolsManual/DumpManual.md

Dumping Data from an ArangoDB database

@NAVIGATE_DumpManual @EMBEDTOC{DumpManualTOC}

To dump data from an ArangoDB server instance, you will need to invoke arangodump. It can be invoked by executing the following command:

unix> arangodump --output-directory "dump"

This will connect to an ArangoDB server and dump all non-system collections from the default database (_system) into an output directory named dump. Invoking arangodump will fail if the output directory already exists. This is an intentional security measure to prevent you from accidently overwriting already dumped data. If you are positive that you want to overwrite data in the output directory, you can use the parameter --overwrite true to confirm this:

unix> arangodump --output-directory "dump" --overwrite true

arangodump will by default connect to the _system database using the default endpoint. If you want to connect to a different database or a different endpoint, or use authentication, you can use the following command-line options:

• --server.database <string>: name of the database to connect to
• --server.endpoint <string>: endpoint to connect to
• --server.username <string>: username
• --server.password <string>: password to use (omit this and you'll be prompted for the password)
• --server.disable-authentication <bool>: whether or not to use authentication

Here's an example of dumping data from a non-standard endpoint, using a dedicated database name:

unix> arangodump --server.endpoint tcp://192.168.173.13:8531 --server.username backup --server.database mydb --output-directory "dump"

When finished, arangodump will print out a summary line with some aggregate statistics about what it did, e.g.:

Processed 43 collection(s), wrote 408173500 byte(s) into datafiles, sent 88 batch(es)

By default, arangodump will dump both structural information and documents from all non-system collections. To adjust this, there are the following command-line arguments:

• --dump-data <bool>: set to true to include documents in the dump. Set to false to exclude documents. The default value is true.
• --include-system-collections <bool>: whether or not to include system collections in the dump. The default value is false.

For example, to only dump structural information of all collections (including system collections), use:

unix> arangodump --dump-data false --include-system-collections true --output-directory "dump"

To restrict the dump to just specific collections, there is is the --collection option. It can be specified multiple times if required:

unix> arangodump --collection myusers --collection myvalues --output-directory "dump"

Structural information for a collection will be saved in files with name pattern <collection-name>.structure.json. Each structure file will contains a JSON object with these attributes:

• parameters: contains the collection properties
• indexes: contains the collection indexes

Document data for a collection will be saved in files with name pattern <collection-name>.data.json. Each line in a data file is a document insertion/update or deletion marker, alongside with some meta data.