Backups overview

A backup is a static copy of a serverless index that only consumes storage. It's a non-queryable representation of a set of records. You can create a backup of a serverless index, and you can create a new serverless index from a backup. This allows you to restore the index with the same or different configurations.

Creating a backup is useful when performing tasks like the following:

• Protecting an index from manual or system failures.
• Temporarily shutting down an index.
• Copying the data from one index into a different index.
• Making a backup of your index.
• Experimenting with different index configurations.

Instead of creating backups manually, you can define a recurring backup schedule that runs automatically. Each schedule includes:

• Frequency: Backups can run daily, weekly, or monthly.
• Retention: A required expiration policy that automatically deletes old backups, keeping storage costs predictable.

Each index supports one active schedule at a time. Backups created by a schedule are automatically named {name}-{ISO8601_timestamp}.

You can create and manage backup schedules in the Pinecone console or with the API. For step-by-step instructions, see Schedule automated backups.

For example, to create a daily backup that expires after 7 days:

curl -sS -X POST "https://api.pinecone.io/indexes/${INDEX_NAME}/backup-schedules" \
  -H "api-key: ${PINECONE_API_KEY}" \
  -H "X-Pinecone-Api-Version: 2026-07" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "my-nightly-backup",
    "schedule": {
      "type": "time-based",
      "frequency": "daily"
    },
    "retention": {
      "expire_after_days": 7
    }
  }'

Deleting a schedule doesn't delete any backups that were previously created by it. If you delete an index, all associated schedules are automatically deleted.

For more details, see the API reference:

• Create backup schedule
• List backup schedules
• Describe backup schedule
• Update backup schedule
• Delete backup schedule
• List schedule history

Backup and restore times depend upon the size of the index and number of namespaces:

• For less than 1M vectors in a namespace, backups and restores take approximately 10 minutes.
• For 100,000,000 vectors, backups and restores can take up to 5 hours.

Backup limitations are as follows:

• Backups are stored in the same project, cloud provider, and region as the source index.
• You can only restore an index to the same project and cloud provider as the source index. Restoring to a different region on the same cloud provider is supported using the unstable API version. For details, see Restore to a different region.
• Backups only include vectors that were in the index at least 15 minutes prior to the backup time. This means that if a vector was inserted into an index and a backup was immediately taken after, the recently inserted vector may not be backed up. More specifically, if a backup is created only a few minutes after the source index was created, the backup may have 0 vectors.
• You can only perform operations on backups in the current Pinecone project.
• Backups are supported for indexes without a schema definition and for integrated embedding indexes that use the Records API. They're not supported for full-text search indexes with document schemas that include full_text_search string fields, dense_vector fields, or sparse_vector fields. Indexes with document schemas also don't support semantic_text fields.

• To understand how cost is calculated for backups and restores, see Understanding cost.
• For up-to-date pricing information, see Pricing.