How to Migrate or Copy MongoDB documents to another Server

I recently installed Kubuntu 18.04 on my desktop PC, after doing a wipe-and-reinstall of my Windows 10 installation on the SSD.Altough most of my code is backed up either locally or on Github my MongoDB documents are not, because i never found it necessary.

The current version of my chat app needs some filler data so as to test certain functionality, and so i decided to migrate MongoDB documents from my laptop to my Kubuntu install on the desktop, this will be accomplished through native MongoDB utilities for backup and restore, and Secure Copy or scp to copy files from Laptop to Desktop over the network through SSH

Setup

• The Receiver PC running openssh-server , installable on Ubuntu/Debian based systems by

    sudo apt install openssh-server
  

• The Sender PC having ssh installed, this should be default on most installations of Ubuntu
• Both sender and receiver should have MongoDB installed, for obvious reasons :P
• Both sender and receiver should have ifconfig tool from net-tools package on Ubuntu or Debian for finding out the IP address of both systems

    sudo apt install net-tools
  

Migrations

• On your sender PC and receiver PC, make a directory called mongobackups in your home folder or any other location

    mkdir ~/mongobackups
  

• Again on the sender PC, backup your mongoDB documents to the mongobackups folder, yourdb here is just the name of your MongoDB collection

    sudo mongodump --db yourdb --out ~/mongobackups/`date +"%d-%m-%y"`
  

  This date +"%d-%m-%y" creates a folder with the current date stamp, inside this folder there will be .bson files containing your documents

• Make sure openssh-server is installed on the receiver PC,and run ifconfig to find the IP address of your receiver PC, in my case it is 192.168.2.3

• On the Sender PC scp the mongobackups folder to the mongobackups on the receiver PC like so.Replace shawn with your username of your receiver PC

    scp -r ~/mongobackups/  shawn@192.168.2.3:~/mongobackups
  

  You will be prompted for your password.

• On the Receiver pc now your restore your backups using mongorestore, 06-01-19 and yourdb are just placeholders,enter your own datestamp folder and collection name instead

    sudo mongorestore --db yourdb --drop ~/mongobackups/06-01-19/yourdb/
  

You should now be able to use your MongoDB documents in your webapp now.