VeleroNoRecentBackup has been firing CRITICAL on prod over a backup that was actually protecting everything. velero-daily-20260919030041: PartiallyFailed, 3079/3079 items backed up, exactly 2 errors — both PodVolumeBackups for the `plugins` and `scratch` volumes of homepage-default-kopia-maintain-job-1789786837269-qhsvh. Four such PVB failures had accumulated. Velero runs transient kopia repository-maintenance Jobs in its own namespace, one per BackupRepository, each with emptyDir `plugins` and `scratch` volumes. Schedule (1) runs defaultVolumesToFsBackup:true — the opt-out model — so it attempts fs-backup on those volumes too. The Job finishes and its pod disappears mid-backup, and the PodVolumeBackup fails. Nothing real was ever missed. But PartiallyFailed does not advance velero_backup_last_successful_timestamp, so the alert that exists to catch a genuine backup outage fires every night over Velero cleaning up after itself. An alert that cries wolf nightly is how a real failure gets ignored — and this one guards R-STATE-03. Fix uses the pattern already established for monitoring+unifi: exclude the namespace's volume DATA from schedule (1), keep its RESOURCES in schedule (2). Safe by inspection — ns velero holds no PVCs, so there is no volume data to lose, while the BSL, credentials and Backup CRs that DR actually needs are still captured. Deliberately narrower than the general rule. The general fix is a volume policy skipping emptyDir by type, which would also cover a transient Job in any other namespace, but it needs Velero's `volumeTypes` policy condition — unproven in this repo on 1.18.1, and a policies.yaml Velero cannot parse breaks EVERY backup. That is a much worse failure than the one being fixed, and all four observed failures were kopia-maintain pods in ns velero. Rationale recorded inline so the next person can widen it on purpose rather than by accident. Gated: L0 whole-repo 21 cases, 0 failures, 0 skips, 0 unwired. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
platform/velero
Velero — off-cluster backup and DR of Kubernetes resource state + PVC data.
- Governing ADR: ADR-0003 — Longhorn (+ bulk tier + Velero)
- Spec: docs/04 — Storage & State
- Serves: R-STATE-03
- Owner: WS-STORAGE
What this is (LIVE)
Flux HelmRelease (Velero chart 12.x / Velero 1.18.x) wired to the on-Proxmox MinIO S3 target:
- Endpoint:
http://192.168.1.9:9000(plain HTTP, path-style, regionus-east-1placeholder) - BucketStorageLocation
default: provideraws, bucketvelero,s3ForcePathStyle=true. - AWS plugin (
velero/velero-plugin-for-aws) loaded as an init container. - File System Backup (kopia):
deployNodeAgent=true,uploaderType=kopia,snapshotsEnabled=false— storage-agnostic PVC backup, no CSI snapshot / data-mover. - Credentials:
velero-cloud-credentials— a SOPS Secret (velero-cloud.sops.yaml) holding thecloudINI key, the scoped MinIO key limited to thevelero+cnpgbuckets. Kept in sync with the staging source of truthplatform/backup/minio-credentials.sops.yamland the Proxmox host ansible-vault.
Reconciled by its own non-gating Flux Kustomization clusters/base/backup.yaml
(dependsOn: platform-config, wait:false) — a backup controller must never gate the platform graph.
Backup scope (what's included vs excluded)
Two daily Schedules (cadence ${VELERO_BACKUP_SCHEDULE}, retention ${VELERO_RETENTION}):
| Schedule | Namespaces | Volumes (kopia FSB) |
|---|---|---|
daily |
ALL except monitoring, unifi |
all PVC data (defaultVolumesToFsBackup:true, opt-out) |
daily-resources-only |
monitoring, unifi |
none (defaultVolumesToFsBackup:false) — resources only |
Excluded volume data (reconstructable, per the sizing decision):
monitoring— Prometheus TSDB PVC (ephemeral) + Loki 72h-log PVC. Grafana/Alertmanager areemptyDir(no PVC); Grafana dashboards are GitOps-provisioned.unifi— the ~7.4 GiB KubeVirt VM disk (huge; UniFi is protected by its own config export).
Their Kubernetes resources are still captured (by daily-resources-only) to aid DR.
Included (the irreplaceable ~6 GiB): every other namespace's PVC data via kopia — Nextcloud data,
Gitea, Plex/*arr config, PiHole, and the CNPG Postgres PVCs. (CNPG DBs additionally have native Barman
PITR to the cnpg bucket — see the DB manifests.)
Post-deploy (PM)
velero backup-location get→defaultAvailable.velero backup create --from-schedule daily→ objects land unders3://velero/.- DR drill (R-STATE-03, Phase-4 gate):
velero restore create --from-backup <name>into a scratch namespace and verify PVC data restores via the node-agent.