Do backups get automatically imported from S3 into clusters? I want to ensure I can do a restore.

[carlisia]

I didn't see in the documentation any references to handling the import of backup objects.

[carlisia]

By @dsu-igeek (with edits):

There’s a set of Velero Backup resources in the cluster that was backed up, and representations of these backups are uploaded and stored in the S3 bucket as the one source or truth. Velero knows about this bucket based on the configuration of the BackupStorageLocation resource. Those backup resources are populated automatically into any cluster where Velero is installed and a BackupStorageLocation is configured for the same storage location.

Velero restore is used to restore the resources that are specified in the backup (sometimes it is all resources, sometimes is a selected sub-set).

So, for complete disaster recovery, the first step is install Velero in the cluster you want to restore backups to, configure the BackupStorageLocation to point to where your backups were uploaded to, wait for the backup you want to restore from to sync into the new cluster (this should happen very quickly), then do a velero restore --from-backup <backup name>.

Depending on how the PV data was backed up, you may need to be in the same AZ or sharing the storage system where PV snapshots were stored.