I recently had to figure out how to copy one MongoHQ database to another. Because copyDatabase requires admin privileges I wasn't able to use it. The best I got is a mongodump and mongorestore, which wastes massive amounts of bandwidth for large databases hosted remotely. MongoHQ doesn't give users admin privileges to run this command and never will (http://support.mongohq.com/discussions/problems/551-i-tried-to-do-a-copy_database-after-a-drop-which-failed-and-now-my-database-has-no-collections-cant-login). Maybe there's a way to implement a "user-mode" copy of databases that would replicate non-system tables and not touch any admin functions?