Summary
WiredTiger needs to provide a new form of a backup cursor URI, called backup:export. When that is specified as the URI, WiredTiger will generate a different backup metadata table called WiredTiger.export. This will contain all the same information that today’s WiredTiger.backup contains, but with a different name so that a restart does not attempt to use it to start a system. When that special cursor is closed, WiredTiger will remove the WiredTiger.export file. This cursor will act in every way like a normal full hot backup cursor (but not an incremental backup cursor). That is, it will generate the same list of files and the user can walk the cursor retrieving the names for files for copying, including WiredTiger.export. Really the only difference is the naming of the metadata file.

In the attachment, there is an example of metadata(metadata.txt) and WiredTiger.backup of a non-tiered database with a single table named "test".

Also, there is metadata_tiered.txt which is the metadata of a tiered database with a single table named "test". "flush_tier" was called twice for the database.