Reasons to avoid PV/PVC as opposed to S3 as a storage location for the Rancher Backup Operator

Article Number: 000021747

Environment

Rancher 2.x
Rancher Backup Operator

Situation

Choosing a Persistent Volume  over a S3 bucket as the storage location for the Rancher Backup Operator.

Resolution

Using the Rancher Backup Operator with a PVC is not very intuitive from a recovery point of view, as the PVs are tied to the Kubernetes cluster.

If that cluster is lost, a detached PV is left, that needs to be attached to another host to copy the Rancher Backup Operator snapshots out of, and then copy into a PV on a freshly created cluster. 

If a S3 endpoint is not readily available, it would be easier to use the local Rancher clusters own RKE2 etcd snapshots, which can be copied off the nodes to a different location via a simple cronjob on the hosts themselves.