26.3. Restoring Your Data

The Neo4j backups are fully functional databases. To use a backup, all you need to do replace your database folder with the backup. Just make sure the database isn’t running while replacing the folder.

To restore from backup in a clustered environment, follow these steps:

  1. Shut down all instances in the cluster.
  2. Restore the backup to the individual database folders.
  3. Restart the instances.

Make sure there’s at least one neostore.transaction.db.nnn file included in the backup. If there isn’t, start up one instance in stand-alone mode first, and issue one updating transaction against it (any sort of write, like creating a node). Then copy that database to all instances in your cluster.