Velero Operator file system backup

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File system backup

The file system backup (FSB), also called Pod volume backup, reads data from the mounted volumes on nodes via the Velero node-agent DaemonSet and writes it to your backup storage. It uses modules from open-source tools such as Restic and Kopia.

When to use FSB

  • Your storage/CSI doesn’t support volume snapshots, or snapshots are unreliable/unavailable in the target environment.
  • You need a provider-agnostic capture of Pod volumes (e.g., NFS/hostPath), or a fallback for volumes the snapshotter can’t handle.
  • You want Velero to back up files rather than rely on cloud disk APIs.

Expect higher runtime and object-store usage vs. snapshots.

Enable FSB in Charmed Velero

You can turn on node-agent and make FS backup the default for Pod volumes by setting the following config options to true:

juju config velero-operator use-node-agent=true
juju config velero-operator default-volumes-to-fs-backup=true
  • use-node-agent deploys the DaemonSet that performs FSB.
  • default-volumes-to-fs-backup makes all pod volumes use FSB by default (no pod annotations required).

See Velero file system backup for more details.