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Quick Start Tutorial

Create your first backup in under 5 minutes.

Step 1: Create a Storage Backend

First, define where backups will be stored. This example uses AWS S3 with IRSA (IAM Roles for Service Accounts on EKS) — no credentials in manifests. Feel free to use either plain Kubernetes Secrets or secret providers depending on your use case. You can see an example with Kubernetes Secrets in the Quick Start on the home page.

Credentials

With IRSA, the pod receives credentials from the EKS service account. Alternatively, you can use Kubernetes Secrets (created manually or via a secrets provider such as External Secrets Operator, HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager CSI driver, or Sealed Secrets) and reference them in secretRef. See Storage Backend Examples for S3 with Secret.

# storage-backend.yaml
apiVersion: retour.thebackup.company/v1
kind: StorageBackend
metadata:
  name: s3-production
  namespace: retour
spec:
  type: s3
  s3:
    bucket: retour-backups
    region: us-east-1
    useSSL: true
    envAuth: true

kubectl apply -f storage-backend.yaml

Wait for the StorageBackend to become Ready:

kubectl get storagebackends -n retour

Step 2: Create a Backup

Point Retour at a Deployment. Retour will discover its PVCs automatically:

# backup.yaml
apiVersion: retour.thebackup.company/v1
kind: Backup
metadata:
  name: my-first-backup
  namespace: retour
spec:
  storageBackend: s3-production
  namespacedResources:
    - resourceType: Deployment
      namespace: default
      name: nginx

kubectl apply -f backup.yaml

Step 3: Monitor Progress

# Watch backup status
kubectl get backups -n retour -w

# Check worker pod logs
kubectl logs -f -n retour -l app=retour-worker

Phases: Pending → Running → Completed (or Failed)

Step 4: Restore (Optional)

To restore from the backup:

# restore.yaml
apiVersion: retour.thebackup.company/v1
kind: Restore
metadata:
  name: my-restore
  namespace: retour
spec:
  backupName: my-first-backup
  storageBackend: s3-production

kubectl apply -f restore.yaml
kubectl get restores -n retour -w

Next Steps