Help restoring a mongodump 3.4 backup into a different instance I am working on backup recovery for MongoDB 3.4. We have an instance that is running and being used. I set up a instance for doing testing of the backup and recovery process. In order to get data I did mongodump for each database and copied the files to my test server. Each backup write files to a directory that has the same name as the database. I used the gzip option to make it easier to move the files around. I am having issues trying to do the mongorestore. Can someone give me the syntax for mongorestore?

Here is the dump command

mongodump --port 27017 --authenticationDatabase admin -u my_admin_user
          -p password -o /backup_dir --gzip -d test_db


(split to multiple lines for readability)

These are the directories with the contents of my_test_db

root@my_vm:~/mongodb_backup_full_data_dump &gt; ls -l
total 20
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Aug 24 13:30 admin
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Aug 24 13:51 data1
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Aug 24 14:20 data2
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Aug 24 14:20 data3
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Aug 24 14:20 my_test_db
root@my_vm:~/mongodb_backup_full_data_dump &gt; ls -l ./my_test_db/*
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root    24263 Aug 24 14:20 ./my_test_db/journal_entries.bson.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root      132 Aug 24 14:20 ./my_test_db/journal_entries.metadata.json.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root      481 Aug 24 14:20 ./my_test_db/journal_users.bson.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root      107 Aug 24 14:20 ./my_test_db/journal_users.metadata.json.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 14438174 Aug 24 14:20 ./my_test_db/test_collection.bson.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root      104 Aug 24 14:20 ./my_test_db/test_collection.metadata.json.gz


and, this is what happens when I try to do the restore:

mongorestore --port 27017 --authenticationDatabase admin -u my_admin_user -p password -o /backup_dir \
--gzip -d test_db /root/mongodb_backup_full_data_dump/test_db/journal_entries.bson.gz



2017-08-25T15:24:05.487-0400    the --db and --collection args should only be used when restoring from a BSON file. Other uses are deprecated and will not exist in the future; use --nsInclude instead
2017-08-25T15:24:05.487-0400    checking for collection data in /root/mongodb_backup_full_data_dump/mediax
2017-08-25T15:24:05.487-0400    Failed: error scanning filesystem: file /root/mongodb_backup_full_data_dump/mediax is a directory, not a bson file
Answer is  

mongorestore --port 27017 --authenticationDatabase admin -u my_admin_user -p password --gzip /root/mongodb_backup_full_data_dump/


So, you just tell the directory (basedir) where "all" backups are. mongorestore will "restore" those files (in those sub-directories) to databases (come from directory name). 

SO, if you change that "test_db" directory name (mv test_db other_test_db) to "other_test_db", it will restore those files to "other_test_db"