Whats the preferred way to backup an entire firestore database automatically on a schedule that would allow for a manual restore

Question

New to Firestore, really enjoy using it but the one issue I have is that I can't see an obvious way to backup the entire database for a given project, the idea being that if anything goes wrong I can overwrite the nodes with the backup.

Lustrum

Answer 1

In the Realtime Database, you can back up your data by simply exporting it from the Firebase Console. However, for Firestore, you have to use Google Cloud Console. Here are the docs:

• https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/manage-data/export-import

If you need to schedule that operation, it's recommended to use Cloud Functions for Firebase as explained here:

• https://cloud.google.com/firestore/docs/solutions/schedule-export

Seashore

Hey Jeff. Can I help you with other information? – Seashore

The top link is no longer valid I think. – Antoninaantonino

@ShaunRamsey I just checked and it is still valid. – Seashore

So it seems it is! I tried to go to it 3 times and got "Service Unavailable." However, with a few refreshes and trying different browsers it comes right up. It makes me wonder how many times this has happened to me and I gave up on valid documentation because this has happened to me a lot in the firebase websites. Thanks for the confirmation! – Antoninaantonino

Answer 2

There's a new way to automatically setup and schedule your Firestore backups using gcloud.

I also published a blog post on how you can use the Python discovery client to achieve the same programatically.

Scaler

This option is indeed great, but the document doesn't have specific section to select "collectionIDs" whereas scheduled data export allows us to do so. – Chemesh