Velero: design for data-only restores

[ncdc]

If you have pods running in a cluster and you're using Ark to take backups of their PVCs, it would be nice to be able to do a data-only restore. In other words, for pods owned by deployments, replica sets, etc., create a new PV from a backup snapshot, associate it with a PVC, and update the deployment to use the new volume.

[ncdc]

cc @jbeda @dhanmm @emuetzel for input

[rosskukulinski]

This feature would be a great-use case for Ark. We will need to spend some time thinking about the CLI UX & data models that would enable this capability. I think this is a strong contender for new functionality for 1.0.0 or earlier.

[skriss]

Tentatively moving this into v1.3 - at a minimum, we should try to do the design work.

[nrb]

For anyone doing the design, consider differences between Velero-native snapshots and CSI volume snapshots

[onedr0p]

I am just chiming in to say this would be great from a GitOps perspective, all I care about is backing up and restoring the PVCs to my deployments.

[dejwsz]

I need it too! I think it is a must-have functionality. I described something similar here: https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero/issues/2598
My case relates to a restic daemon which is used to get volumes' content backup. What I need is to have an ability to restore old content of some volume leaving other project's objects in place. I think this is a quite common use case. I was not aware it is missing in Velero, I assumed it must be there but it turned out it isn't.

[pPanda-beta]

This is open for almost 2 yrs now, any workarounds to at least restore data to new PVs assigned with same PVC?

[stepan111]

As opposite to @dejwsz I though of using restic snapshots to migrate PVCs in another k8s cluster.
I have a bunch of stateful applications deployed with helm and miscellaneous operators. In common I expect that in new cluster helm deployed application will use restored PVCs as it's own made. That feature can simplify management of stateful applications in declarative way.

[eleanor-millman]

Closing because it is gnarly to solve and we don't have enough interest yet to justify the development.

[dsu-igeek]

Closing again, first time didn't take

[yunusemrecatalcam]

when using velero native snapshots we can actually use selectors to just select pv,pvc to do that. But when we're using restic mode, I couldn't find a solution. And I couldn't find a solution for that, anyone facing this?
When I use selectors, it automatically uses snapshot mode I guess, even though I pass the flag --default-volumes-to-restic
Any help appreciated.
Here's my issue explaining a little more
https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero/issues/3832