I would recommend against using mongodump/mongorestore. It is very slow and once you get past 20/30GB of data it can take hours to restore. Moreover your data keeps changing during the backup – so you don’t get a consistent snapshot. Use a filesystem snapshot or cloud snapshot mechanism. At MongoDirector we use LVM snapshots to get a point in time copy of the database and we store it in S3 as a backup – http://blog.mongodirector.com/mongodb-backup-and-restore/