---
title: Backups
weight: 60
---

# Cloud Backups

Qdrant organizes cloud instances as clusters. On occasion, you may need to
restore your cluster because of application or system failure.

You may already have a source of truth for your data in a regular database. If you
have a problem, you could reindex the data into your Qdrant vector search cluster.
However, this process can take time. For high availability critical projects we
recommend replication. It guarantees the proper cluster functionality as long as
at least one replica is running.

For less critical use-cases you can set up automatic or self-service backups.

## Prerequisites

You can back up your Qdrant clusters though the Qdrant Cloud
Dashboard at https://cloud.qdrant.io. This section assumes that you've already
set up your cluster, as described in the following sections:

- [Create a cluster](/documentation/cloud/create-cluster/)
- Set up [Authentication](/documentation/cloud/authentication/)
- Configure one or more [Collections](/documentation/concepts/collections/)

## Automatic backups

You can set up automatic backups of your clusters with our Cloud UI at
https://cloud.qdrant.io. With the procedures listed in this page, you can set up
snapshots on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. You can keep as many snapshots as you
need. You can restore a cluster from the snapshot of your choice.

> Note: Restoring a snapshot may create issues:
> - The affected cluster is not available while a snapshot is being restored.
> - If you changed the cluster setup after the copy was created, the new cluster 
    resets to the previous configuration. You may lose data after the date of 
    that restored snapshot.

### Configure a backup

After you have taken the prerequisite steps, you can configure a backup with the
[Qdrant Cloud Dashboard](https://cloud.qdrant.io). To do so, take these steps:

1. Sign in to the dashboard
1. Select Clusters.
1. Select the cluster that you want to back up.
   ![Select a cluster](/documentation/cloud/select-cluster.png)
1. Find and select the **Backups** tab.
1. Now you can set up a backup schedule.
   The **Days of Retention** is the number of days after a backup snapshot is
   deleted.
1. Alternatively, you can select **Backup now** to take an immediate snapshot.

![Configure a cluster backup](/documentation/cloud/backup-schedule.png)

### Restore a backup

If you have a backup, it appears in the list of **Available Backups**. You can
choose to restore or delete the backups of your choice.

![Restore or delete a cluster backup](/documentation/cloud/restore-delete.png)

<!-- I think we should move this to the Snapshot page, but I'll do it later -->

## Backups with a snapshot

Qdrant also offers a snapshot API which allows you to create a snapshot
of a specific collection or your entire cluster. For more information, see our
[snapshot documentation](/documentation/concepts/snapshots/).

Here is how you can snapshot and recover a collection:

1. Take a snapshot:
   - For a single node cluster, call the snapshot endpoint on the exposed URL.
   - For a multi node cluster call a snapshot on each node of the collection. 
     Specifically, prepend `node-{num}-` to your cluster URL.
     Then call the [snapshot endpoint](../../concepts/snapshots/#create-snapshot) on the individual hosts. Start with node 0.
   - In the response, you'll see the name of the snapshot.
2. Delete and recreate the collection.
3. Recover the snapshot:
   - Call the [recover endpoint](../../concepts/snapshots/#recover-in-cluster-deployment). Set a location which points to the snapshot file (`file:///qdrant/snapshots/{collection_name}/{snapshot_file_name}`) for each host.

## Backup considerations

Backups are incremental. For example, if you have two backups, backup number 2
contains only the data that changed since backup number 1. This reduces the
total cost of your backups.

You can create multiple backup schedules.

When you restore a snapshot, any changes made after the date of the snapshot
are lost.