If we don't want to use any of the preceding options outlined, our last resort is copying the raw files using cp/rsync or something equivalent. This is generally not recommended for the following reasons:

• We need to stop all writes before copying files
• Backup size will be larger since we need to copy indexes, and any underlying padding and fragmentation storage overhead
• We cannot get point-in-time recovery using this method for replica sets and copying data from sharded clusters in a consistent and predictable manner is extremely difficult