Description

Some of our customer have retention requirements to meet that cause them to need to store N years of backups.

Many of our larger customers are unable to keep up with our release schedule and stay on older versions of our software.

In both cases, customers have an expectation that they can restore dumps of databases taken from earlier versions into the current version.  

Our current stance from a support perspective, is that we do not guarantee that dumps from previous releases will be compatible with current versions.  But that does not appear to actually be stated anywhere in the documentation.  

This ticket is a request to formalize our expectation with respect to compatibility between dumps taken on older server versions and being able to restore them to current versions.

Scope of changes

• Confirm w/ engineering what if any guarantees we can provide when restoring a mongodump archive to a mongod running a newer version than the snapshot.
• Document in the mongodump/mongorestore reference pages recommendations / guidance on versioning
• Document in the backup/restore documentation recommendations/guidance on versioning

Impact to Other Docs

This may have some impact on the Atlas docs, as mongodump -> mongorestore acts as a sort of catch-all vector for users that cannot use the other available import methods. We do not currently speak to versioning on the import docs. cc jonathan.destefano@10gen.com

MVP (Work and Date)

Resources (Scope or Design Docs, Invision, etc.)