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Percona Operators Documentation

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About backups

In this section you will learn how to set up and manage backups of your data using the Operator.

You can make backups in two ways:

  • On-demand. You can do them manually at any moment.
  • Schedule backups. Configure backups and their schedule in the deploy/cr.yaml file. The Operator makes them automatically according to the schedule.

What you need to know

Backup methods

By default, the Operator uses the open source pgBackRest backup and restore utility to make backups.

Starting with version 2.9.0, the Operator also supports PVC snapshots - storage-level copies of your data volumes. PVC snapshots offer much faster backups and restores. When used with pgBackRest WAL archiving, they maintain data consistency and enable you to make point-in-time recovery of your database.

This feature is in the tech preview stage. You must explicitly enable it for the Operator deployment.

Backup repositories

When the Operator creates a new PostgreSQL cluster, it also creates a special pgBackRest repository to facilitate the usage of the pgBackRest features. You can notice an additional repo-host Pod after the cluster creation.

A pgBackRest repository consists of the following Kubernetes objects:

  • A Deployment,
  • A Secret that contains information specific to the PostgreSQL cluster (e.g. SSH keys, AWS S3 keys, etc.),
  • A Pod with a number of supporting scripts,
  • A Service.

In the /deploy/cr.yml file, pgBackRest repositories are listed in the backups.pgbackrest.repos subsection. You can have up to 4 repositories as repo1, repo2, repo3, and repo4.

Backup types

You can make the following types of backups:

  • full: A full backup of all the contents of the PostgreSQL cluster,
  • differential: A backup of only the files that have changed since the last full backup,
  • incremental: Default. A backup of only the files that have changed since the last full or differential backup.

Backup storage

You have the following options to store PostgreSQL backups:

Next steps

Ready to move forward? Configure backup storage

Last update: February 19, 2026
Created: February 19, 2026