velero/docs/faq.md

FAQ

When is it appropriate to use Ark instead of etcd's built in backup/restore?

If you only want to backup/restore a single etcd cluster, you may be better of using etcd's backup and restore tooling. However, doing so restricts you to reconstructing your Kubernetes cluster data exactly as it was preserved. Etcd's restore tooling is good if what you want is to recover from data loss in a single etcd cluster, but does not support more sophisticated restores such as cluster migrations and restoring Kubernetes state stored across multiple etcd clusters.

Ark is useful for:

• backing up both Kubernetes resources and persistent volume state
• cluster migrations
• backing up a subset of your Kubernetes resources
• backing up Kubernetes resources that are stored across multiple etcd clusters (for example if you run a custom apiserver)

Will Ark restore my Kubernetes resources exactly the way they were before?

Yes, with some exceptions. For example, when Ark restores pods it deletes the nodeName from the pod so that it can be scheduled onto a new node. You can see some more examples of the differences in pod_restorer.go