How to perform one-time DB sync to another DB in MongoDB?

If it's a one time-thing

and you want fine control over parameters such as which collections to sync, you should use:

• mongodump to dump bson files of your Production DB to your local machine
• mongorestore to then, retrieve the dumped BSON files in your Local DB

Otherwise you should check out mongo-sync

It's a script I wrote for my self when I had to constantly copy my Local MongoDB database to and from my Production DB for a Project (I know it's stupid).

Once you put your DB details in config.yml, you can start syncing using two simple commands:

./mongo-sync push       # Push DB to Remote./mongo-sync pull       # Pull DB to Local

If you use it inside some project, it's a good idea to add config.yml to .gitignore

You can use the db.copyDatabase(...) or db.cloneDatabase(...) commands:

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Copy+Database+Commands

This is faster than mongodump / mongorestore because it skips creating the bson representation on disk.

When you want the dev database to look exactly like the production database, you can just copy the files. I am currently running a setup where I synchronize my MongoDB database between my desktop and my notebook with dropbox - even that works flawless.