Choosing a Kubernetes Backup Strategy: Velero vs Native Snapshots vs Application-Level Backups

Calendar February 21, 2026
Infrastructure
Intermediate, Advanced
Backup-Strategy, Disaster-Recovery-Planning, Data-Protection
Velero, Backup, Disaster-Recovery, Volume-Snapshots, Etcd, Kubernetes, Persistent-Volumes
Velero, Etcdctl, Kubectl, Pg_dump, Mysqldump, Mongodump

Choosing a Kubernetes Backup Strategy#

Kubernetes clusters contain two fundamentally different types of state: cluster state (the Kubernetes objects themselves – Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets, CRDs) and application data (the contents of Persistent Volumes). A complete backup strategy must address both. Most backup failures happen because teams back up one but not the other, or because they never test the restore process.

What Needs Backing Up#

Before choosing tools, inventory what your cluster contains: