# Any pbm utility tool to extract JSON from the pbm dump file?

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/any-pbm-utility-tool-to-extract-json-from-the-pbm-dump-file/17804>\
**Category:** Percona Backup for MongoDB\
**Created:** [October 2, 2022, 6:41pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/any-pbm-utility-tool-to-extract-json-from-the-pbm-dump-file/17804 "2022-10-02T18:41:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Tim\_Heckel](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/tim_heckel/32/5834_2.png) [@Tim\_Heckel](https://forums.percona.com/u/Tim_Heckel)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2022, 6:41pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/any-pbm-utility-tool-to-extract-json-from-the-pbm-dump-file/17804/1 "2022-10-02T18:41:15Z")

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I’m not having any luck restoring my cluster using pbm given the topology concerns [here](https://forums.percona.com/t/how-to-get-pbm-to-recognize-two-different-replicasets-for-backup/17789/2) , but I do have the backups in this form in my s3 bucket:

```auto
2022-09-19T14:30:22Z_rs0.dump.gz

```

When I decompress this file, it’s almost 3 GB as a `.dump` file - is there any pbm command/tool that can extract the JSON of the mongo documents from this file? It’s a binary file, but I’m hopeful there is some way of viewing the raw JSON/BSON that was backed up inside it?

Thanks,  
Tim

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**Author:** ![Dmytro\_Zghoba](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/dmytro_zghoba/32/4721_2.png) [@Dmytro\_Zghoba](https://forums.percona.com/u/Dmytro_Zghoba)\
**Post date:** [October 4, 2022, 10:56am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/any-pbm-utility-tool-to-extract-json-from-the-pbm-dump-file/17804/2 "2022-10-04T10:56:52Z")

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Hi @Tim_Heckel,

In short, no.

Before PBM v2.0.0, a backup contains data in a complicated format that is not really easy to understand for humans.

Starting from 2.0.0, PBM has a new backup format that contains BSON documents grouped by collection with metafile for the backup placed separately in JSON format. So you can use bsondump (mongo-tools) to print the BSON documents of a collection. Or just review collections info from the metafile (options, indexes, size, count etc.)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Tim\_Heckel](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/tim_heckel/32/5834_2.png) [@Tim\_Heckel](https://forums.percona.com/u/Tim_Heckel)\
**Post date:** [October 4, 2022, 6:39pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/any-pbm-utility-tool-to-extract-json-from-the-pbm-dump-file/17804/3 "2022-10-04T18:39:15Z")

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Thanks for the information. I confirmed the \*.dump files were created with pbm 1.6.1.

So backups made with pbm \> 2.0 have a .bson extension, and backups made prior to 2.0 have a .dump extension?