Neo4j Aura has a feature allowing customers to export a recent backup of their AuraDB Instance to their local server or workstation. This allows customers flexibility to perform a number of actions:

• Copy the data from one Aura instance to another via export then upload.
• Work on the data locally in a development environment without worrying about changing production data.
• Exporting your data if you choose to move to a different hosting platform or database service, including your own Neo4j enterprise or community server(s). 

Aura Automatic Backups

Aura periodically backs up each AuraDB Instance. The exact time will vary, but it is roughly once per 24 hours. In order to export your data, the first backup must have been taken. In other words, your AuraDB Instance must be roughly 1 day old before it can be exported.

Once the first automatic backup is taken, the following backups will occur at about the same time each day. 

Manual Backup

AuraDB Free Tier Instances instances do not include an automatic backup feature. If this is the case or if the first backup hasn't been created yet, you can create a snapshot manually from the 'Snapshots' tab:

 

Downloading a Backup

Once your first backup has been taken, The Snapshots tab within an Aura instance card shows a list of available snapshots. You can find the Snapshots tab via Inspect in the more menu (…​) on the instance card. To the right of each backup that is available, you'll see the 3 dots where you will find an option to export the data:

Clicking that link will immediately download a file named "neo4j-{timestamp}.backup" (for Neo4j 5 instances) or "neo4j.dump" (for Neo4j 4 instances).You can then treat this backup file as any other created by neo4j-admin.

We hope that this new feature will give our customers more flexibility in how they handle and access their data. If you have any questions, please reach out to us via the links below. Thanks, and happy exporting!