For some reason, no matter what I did, the mongoexport or mongodump did not work for me as the default user, even after resetting the password, although I could, however, connect as the default user to the mongo shell.
But the solution for me was on the settings page of your database on mlabs.com, you can create more users, and then I was able to connect to these utilities with a new user. Perhaps you can also create new users in the shell, but id just uses an online tool.
mongoexport -h <serverURL:port> -d <database> -c <collection> -u <newuser> -p <newpassword> -o collection.json
source share