Dump Mongo Collection into JSON format

Mongo includes a mongoexport utility (see docs) which can dump a collection. This utility uses the native libmongoclient and is likely the fastest method.

mongoexport -d <database> -c <collection_name>

Also helpful:

-o: write the output to file, otherwise standard output is used (docs)

--jsonArray: generates a valid json document, instead of one json object per line (docs)

--pretty: outputs formatted json (docs)

Here's mine command for reference:

mongoexport --db AppDB --collection files --pretty --out output.json

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On Windows 7 (MongoDB 3.4), one has to move the cmd to the place where mongod.exe and mongo.exe file resides => C:\MongoDB\Server\3.4\bin else it won't work saying it does not recongnize mongoexport command.

Use mongoexport/mongoimport to dump/restore a collection:

Export JSON File:

mongoexport --db <database-name> --collection <collection-name> --out output.json

Import JSON File:

mongoimport --db <database-name> --collection <collection-name> --file input.json

WARNING mongoimport and mongoexport do not reliably preserve all rich BSON data types because JSON can only represent a subset of the types supported by BSON. As a result, data exported or imported with these tools may lose some measure of fidelity.

Also, http://bsonspec.org/

BSON is designed to be fast to encode and decode. For example, integers are stored as 32 (or 64) bit integers, so they don't need to be parsed to and from text. This uses more space than JSON for small integers, but is much faster to parse.

In addition to compactness, BSON adds additional data types unavailable in JSON, notably the BinData and Date data types.