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Create a backup of an index

Create a backup of an index.

The backup records the schema of the index it is taken from and reports it as schema. An index created from the backup with Create index from backup inherits that schema.

curl
PINECONE_API_KEY="YOUR_API_KEY"
INDEX_NAME="docs-example"

curl "https://api.pinecone.io/indexes/$INDEX_NAME/backups" \
    -H "Api-Key: $PINECONE_API_KEY" \
    -H 'accept: application/json' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -H "X-Pinecone-Api-Version: 2026-07" \
    -d '{
      "name": "example-backup", 
      "description": "Monthly backup of production index"
      }'

POST /indexes/{index_name}/backups

200
{
  "backup_id": "670e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440001",
  "source_index_name": "my-index",
  "source_index_id": "670e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000",
  "source_index_deleted_at": "2024-03-05T12:00:00.000Z",
  "name": "backup-2025-02-04",
  "description": "Backup before bulk update.",
  "status": "Ready",
  "cloud": "aws",
  "region": "us-east-1",
  "schema": {
    "fields": {
      "embedding": {
        "dimension": 1536,
        "metric": "cosine",
        "type": "dense_vector"
      },
      "title": {
        "full_text_search": {
          "language": "en",
          "stemming": false,
          "stop_words": false
        },
        "type": "string"
      }
    }
  },
  "record_count": 120000,
  "namespace_count": 3,
  "size_bytes": 10000000,
  "tags": {
    "tag0": "val0",
    "tag1": "val1"
  },
  "created_at": "2025-02-04T10:30:00.000Z"
}
400
{
  "error": {
    "code": "INVALID_ARGUMENT",
    "message": "Bad request. The request body included invalid request parameters."
  },
  "status": 400
}
403
{
  "error": {
    "code": "FORBIDDEN",
    "message": "Increase your quota or upgrade to create more backups."
  },
  "status": 403
}
422
{
  "error": {
    "code": "UNPROCESSABLE_ENTITY",
    "message": "Failed to deserialize the JSON body into the target type: missing field `metric` at line 1 column 16"
  },
  "status": 422
}
500
{
  "error": {
    "code": "UNKNOWN",
    "message": "Internal server error"
  },
  "status": 500
}

Authorizations

Section titled “Authorizations”
Api-Keystringrequired

An API Key is required to call Pinecone APIs. Get yours from the console.

Headers

Section titled “Headers”
X-Pinecone-Api-Versionstringrequired

Required date-based version header

Typestring
Default2026-07

Path Parameters

Section titled “Path Parameters”
index_namestringrequired

Name of the index to backup

Typestring

Body

Section titled “Body”
name?string

The name of the backup. Must be 1-45 characters long, start and end with an alphanumeric character, and consist only of lower case alphanumeric characters or -; any other value is rejected with 400.

Required string length: 1 - 45. Example: backup-2025-03-15

Typestring
description?string

A description of the backup.

Typestring

Response

Section titled “Response”

200 — The backup was created. The returned backup starts in status Initializing; poll it until the status is Ready.

The BackupModel describes the configuration and status of a Pinecone backup.

backup_idstringrequired

Unique identifier for the backup.

Example: 670e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440001

Typestring
source_index_namestringrequired

Name of the index from which the backup was taken.

Example: my-index

Typestring
source_index_idstringrequired

ID of the index from which the backup was taken.

Example: 670e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000

Typestring
source_index_deleted_at?string

The deletion timestamp when the source index has been deleted. Not present for backups associated with an active index.

Example: 2024-03-05T12:00:00.000Z

Typestring
name?string

Optional user-defined name for the backup.

Example: backup-2025-02-04

Typestring
description?string

Optional description providing context for the backup.

Example: Backup before bulk update.

Typestring
statusstringrequired

Current status of the backup.

Example: Ready

Typestring
cloudstringrequired

Cloud provider where the backup is stored.

Example: aws

Typestring
regionstringrequired

Cloud region where the backup is stored.

Example: us-east-1

Typestring
schema?object

The schema of a Pinecone index. The schema defines the typed fields that documents in the index can contain, including vector fields, semantic text fields, and metadata fields.

Typeobject
Show child attributes
fieldsobjectrequired

A map of field names to their configurations. Indexes that are served by the vectors API — created with the reserved _values / _sparse_values schema, or created by an earlier API version from dimension, metric, and vector_type — report their vector fields under the reserved names _values (dense) and _sparse_values (sparse), and any metadata fields configured for filtering as legacy fields carrying only filterable. Dense vectors-API indexes always report both _values and _sparse_values, regardless of how they were created.

Typeobject
record_count?integer

Total number of records in the backup.

Example: 120000

Typeinteger
namespace_count?integer

Number of namespaces in the backup.

Example: 3

Typeinteger
size_bytes?integer

Size of the backup in bytes.

Example: 10000000

Typeinteger
tags?object | null

Custom user tags added to an index, at most 20 per index. Keys must be 80 characters or less and alphanumeric, '', or '-'. Values must be 120 characters or less and consist of printable ASCII characters or spaces. To unset a key, set the value to be an empty string. null in responses when the index has no tags.

Typeobject | null
created_at?string

Timestamp when the backup was created.

Example: 2025-02-04T10:30:00.000Z

Typestring
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