Understanding collections

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

Creating a collection 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.

Collections operations perform differently, depending on the pod type of the index:

• Creating a p1 or s1 index from a collection takes approximately 10 minutes.
• Creating a p2 index from a collection can take several hours when the number of vectors is on the order of 1,000,000.

Collection limitations are as follows:

• You can only perform operations on collections in the current Pinecone project.

See Pricing for up-to-date pricing information.