Understanding collections ↗
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Documentation Index#
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.pinecone.io/llms.txt Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Create static backups of pod-based indexes with collections
Customers who sign up for a Standard or Enterprise plan on or after August 18, 2025 cannot create pod-based indexes. Instead, create serverless indexes, and consider using dedicated read nodes for large workloads (millions of records or more, and moderate or high query rates).
A collection is a static copy of a pod-based index that only consumes storage. It is a non-queryable representation of a set of records. You can create a collection of a pod-based index, and you can create a new pod-based index from a collection. This allows you to restore the index with the same or different configurations.
Once a collection is created, it cannot be moved to a different project.
Use cases#
Creating a collection is useful when performing tasks like the following:
- Protecting an index from manual or system failures.
- Temporarily shutting down an index.
- Copying the data from one index into a different index.
- Making a backup of your index.
- Experimenting with different index configurations.
Performance#
Collections operations perform differently, depending on the pod type of the index:
- Creating a
p1ors1index from a collection takes approximately 10 minutes. - Creating a
p2index from a collection can take several hours when the number of vectors is on the order of 1,000,000.
Limitations#
Collection limitations are as follows:
- You can only perform operations on collections in the current Pinecone project.
Pricing#
See Pricing for up-to-date pricing information.