Skip to content
Percona Software for MongoDB Documentation

For help, click the link below to get free database assistance or contact our experts for personalized support.

Get help from Percona

Percona Backup for MongoDB configuration in a cluster (or non-sharded replica set)

The configuration information is stored in a single document of the admin.pbmConfig collection. That single copy is shared by all the pbm-agent processes in a cluster (or non-sharded replica set), and can be read or updated using the pbm CLI tool.

You can see the whole config by running:

> db.getSiblingDB(“admin”).pbmConfig.findOne()

But you don’t have to use the mongo shell; the pbm CLI has a “config” subcommand to read and update it.

Percona Backup for MongoDB config contains the following settings:

Run pbm config --list to see the whole config. Sensitive fields such as keys will be redacted.

Insert the whole Percona Backup for MongoDB config from a YAML file

If you are initializing a cluster or a non-sharded replica set for the first time, it is simplest to write the whole config as YAML file and use the pbm config --file command to upload all the values in one command.

Find the config file examples for the remote backup storage (required) in the Example config files section. For more information about available config file options, see Configuration file options.

Use the following command to upload the config file. For example, the config file name is pbm_config.yaml:

$ pbm config --file pbm_config.yaml

Execute the command while connecting to the config server replica set if it is a cluster. Otherwise, connect to the non-sharded replica set as normal. (See MongoDB connection strings - A Reminder (or Primer) if you are not familiar with MongoDB connection strings yet.)

Accessing or updating single config values

You can set a single value at a time. For nested values, use dot-concatenated key names as shown in the following example:

pbm config --set storage.s3.bucket="operator-testing"

You can specify just the key name to list a single value. If set, the command returns the value.

pbm config storage.s3.bucket
operator-testing

pbm config storage.s3.INVALID-KEY
Error: unable to get config key: invalid config key

Synchronize configuration

When you upload a configuration file to PBM either during the initial setup or after you make changes, PBM automatically detects whether it needs to update the local metadata about backups, restores, and point-in-time recovery chunks in PBM Control collections.

For example, if you change the storage configuration, the metadata also changes, and PBM imports it from the storage. But if you only enabled/disabled point-in-time recovery, the metadata remains unchanged.

Though PBM synchronizes metadata automatically, there are cases when you need to run a manual synchronization:

  • When you made changes to the storage manually. For example, you manually added a backup or changed the path to backups.
  • As a post-restore step after a physical restore. After the data is copied back to the mongod nodes, you must manually trigger metadata synchronization from the backup storage.

To sync the metadata, run the following command in the cluster/replica set:

$ pbm config --force-resync
Last update: April 16, 2025
Created: April 16, 2025