Create an index from a backup

The restored index inherits the schema of the index the backup was taken from, including its full-text search fields and its integrated embedding configuration, and the request cannot override it. A backup that carries no schema restores an index whose fields are derived from the source index's dimension, metric, and vector type, and reported under the reserved _values / _sparse_values names.

For serverless backups, you can optionally set read_capacity so the restored index is created with dedicated read nodes (DRN) instead of defaulting to on-demand capacity.

PINECONE_API_KEY="YOUR_API_KEY"
BACKUP_ID="a65ff585-d987-4da5-a622-72e19a6ed5f4"

curl "https://api.pinecone.io/backups/$BACKUP_ID/create-index" \
  -H "Api-Key: $PINECONE_API_KEY" \
  -H "X-Pinecone-Api-Version: 2026-07" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
        "name": "restored-index",
        "tags": {
          "tag0": "val0",
          "tag1": "val1"
        },
        "deletion_protection": "enabled"
      }'

POST /backups/{backup_id}/create-index

• X-Pinecone-Api-Version (header, string, required) — Required date-based version header
• backup_id (path, string, required) — The ID of the backup to create an index from.

• name (body, string, required) — The name of the index. Resource name must be 1-45 characters long, start and end with an alphanumeric character, and consist only of lower case alphanumeric characters or '-'.
• tags (body, object) — 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.
• deletion_protection (body, string) — Whether deletion protection is enabled/disabled for the index. Possible values: disabled or enabled.
• read_capacity (body, object) — By default the index will be created with read capacity mode OnDemand. If you prefer to allocate dedicated read nodes for your workload, you must specify mode Dedicated and additional configurations for node_type and scaling. BYOC indexes do not support OnDemand: a byoc deployment must set mode: Dedicated explicitly, since omitting read_capacity defaults to OnDemand and is reject

• 202 — The request to create the index has been accepted.
• 400 — Bad request. The request body included invalid request parameters.
• 401 — Unauthorized. Possible causes: missing or invalid API key.
• 402 — Payment required. Organization is on a paid plan and is delinquent on payment.
• 403 — Forbidden. Possible causes: the project's index quota is exhausted, dedicated read capacity is not enabled for the organization, or (when configuring) the index's read capacity is not yet Ready.
• 404 — Backup not found.
• 409 — Index of given name already exists.
• 412 — The backup is not in Ready status, so it cannot be restored yet.
• 422 — Unprocessable entity. The request body could not be deserialized.
• 500 — Internal server error.