How to Copy a MongoDB Collection to Another Database

Studio 3T’s convenient built-in copy and paste features allow you to copy or duplicate a MongoDB collection to another database in just a few clicks.

Ready? Download the latest Studio 3T version and let’s roll.

If you’re looking to copy entire MongoDB databases across servers, here’s that article.

Copy MongoDB collection

Select the source collection you want to copy and right-click it in the Connection Tree.

In our case, this is collection test.people on localhost.

Choose Copy Collection.

Paste MongoDB collection

Select your target MongoDB database (or collection) that you want to copy your source collection to.

In our example, that is database “test” on server “ADX”.

Right-click your target and choose Paste Collection.

Configure copy & paste

In the Paste Collection dialog, you can choose how the copy operation should treat (existing) document _ids.

Note that this usually only relevant when you decide to copy a collection into another, existing target collection.

If you paste a collection into a target database that already contains a collection with the same name, the source collection will be inserted with the prefix “Copy_of_”.

To finish, click Paste Collection. This will copy your source collection to your target.

And just like that, your MongoDB collection is copied to another database and/or server.

You can always monitor your copy job on the bottom-left corner and cancel any long-running operations.

Take advantage of other handy copy/paste features in Studio 3T:

Copy and paste MongoDB documents across databases
Copy and paste MongoDB connection strings to connect to your database quickly
Copy and paste MongoDB databases across connections

Updated on October 23, 2020

Tagged: MongoDB for Beginners

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About The Author

Thomas Zahn

Having grown up with a living room that was essentially the office of his mother’s software start-up in the 80s, Thomas is a dyed-in-the-wool software engineer. In the past, he has worked for large outfits such as Microsoft Research and Nokia as well as for specialised engineering shops and start-ups. He lives in Berlin with his wife and two kids, and loves tennis and hiking (though, bizarrely, he constantly seems to find no time to do much of either those two). Thomas holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Freie Universität Berlin.

Comments

Bpg 168
2 years ago
Great. I like it.

David
2 years ago
Hey,
Can I add my DB that locate on AWS server?
When I’m trying to add DB, it asks me for name and I have no idea what my data base’s name
Regards,
David

1. Dakota Karlsson
  2 years ago
  Hi David,
  Thanks for reaching out to us! If you’re able to connect to AWS with Studio 3T, the connection tree should should display your database name. If this doesn’t solve your question, please reach out to us at [email protected].
  Regards,
  Dakota
  
James Fischer
2 years ago
Hi, this is a lovely feature thanks
What is the equivalent from a scripted point of view? I have a migration and I would rather have all the moving of collections done with a script. One can extract and import but then the indexes get lost. Please advise.

1. Dakota Karlsson
  2 years ago
  Hello James!
  Thanks for this question. At the moment, you can try running db.copyDatabase() in IntelliShell to see if that solves your problem – https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/method/db.copyDatabase/. If that doesn’t work with IntelliShell, please reach out to us at [email protected] with more details about your migration and we’ll do our best to solve your query!
  Cheers,
  Dakota