In the previous section, you learned how easy it was to create backups of a RethinkDB cluster. Restoring data from a backup is even easier and has almost the same syntax as the dump command.

If we want to restore a backup from a file called rethinkdb_backup.tar, we run the following command:

rethinkdb restore rethinkdb_backup.tar

This command will load the archive and restore all documents and metadata to your database cluster.

Similar to the dump command, the restore command also allows you to specify the connection data that will be used to connect to the cluster. Just use the -c option followed by the hostname and port. Likewise, you can use the -i option to only import a certain database or table.

If we have a backup of an entire database, but we want to restore just the fake_data table to a RethinkDB instance that has the IP address 10.0.0.1, we can do so by running the following command:

rethinkdb restore rethinkdb_backup.tar -c 10.0.0.1:28015 -i test.fake_data