Normally we can backup Neo4j database by stopping it, archiving graph.db (or another pointed by org.neo4j.server.database.location attribute), and restarting Neo4j. But another, simpler possibility, is neo4j-backup script, located in bin/ directory. To run it, we need to execute:
./neo4j-backup -host localhost -to ./online_backup
It should save database to ./online_backup directory. The output of this operation should look like:
Performing backup from '127.0.0.1:6362' 2014-01-28 21:55:31.740+0000 INFO [org.neo4j]: Copying index/lucene-store.db 2014-01-28 21:55:31.752+0000 INFO [org.neo4j]: Copied index/lucene-store.db 40,00 B 2014-01-28 21:55:31.752+0000 INFO [org.neo4j]: Copying neostore.propertystore.db.strings 2014-01-28 21:55:31.929+0000 INFO [org.neo4j]: Copied neostore.propertystore.db.strings 5,71 MB .... 2014-01-28 21:55:36.634+0000 INFO [org.neo4j]: Done, copied 108 files Full consistency check .................... 10% .................... 20% .................... 30% .................... 40% .................... 50% .................... 60% .................... 70% .................... 80% .................... 90% .... ................ 100% Done