Backups overview ↗
noSummary: Learn about backups of serverless indexes in Pinecone.
Original Documentation
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.
Learn about backups of serverless indexes in Pinecone.
A backup is a static copy of a serverless index that only consumes storage. It is a non-queryable representation of a set of records. You can create a backup of a serverless index, and you can create a new serverless index from a backup. This allows you to restore the index with the same or different configurations.
Use cases#
Creating a backup 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#
Backup and restore times depend upon the size of the index and number of namespaces:
- For less than 1M vectors in a namespace, backups and restores take approximately 10 minutes.
- For 100,000,000 vectors, backups and restores can take up to 5 hours.
Quotas#
| Metric | Starter plan | Standard plan | Enterprise plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Backups per project | N/A | 500 | 1000 |
Limitations#
Backup limitations are as follows:
- Backups are stored in the same project, cloud provider, and region as the source index.
- You can only restore an index to the same project, cloud provider, and region as the source index.
- Backups only include vectors that were in the index at least 15 minutes prior to the backup time. This means that if a vector was inserted into an index and a backup was immediately taken after, the recently inserted vector may not be backed up. More specifically, if a backup is created only a few minutes after the source index was created, the backup may have 0 vectors.
- You can only perform operations on backups in the current Pinecone project.
Backup and restore cost#
- To understand how cost is calculated for backups and restores, see Understanding cost.
- For up-to-date pricing information, see Pricing.
Link last verified
June 7, 2026.
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Source: Pinecone Docs
Link last verified: 2026-02-26