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How To Back Up and Restore a Kubernetes Cluster on DigitalOcean Using Heptio Ark

Heptio Ark is a convenient backup tool for Kubernetes clusters that compresses and backs up Kubernetes objects to object storage. It also takes snapshots of your cluster’s Persistent Volumes using your cloud provider’s block storage snapshot features, and can then restore your cluster’s objects and Persistent Volumes to a previous state.

StackPointCloud’s DigitalOcean Ark Plugin allows you to use DigitalOcean block storage to snapshot your Persistent Volumes, and Spaces to back up your Kubernetes objects. When running a Kubernetes cluster on DigitalOcean, this allows you to quickly back up your cluster’s state and restore it should disaster strike.

In this tutorial we’ll set up and configure the Ark client on a local machine, and deploy the Ark server into our Kubernetes cluster. We’ll then deploy a sample Nginx app that uses a Persistent Volume for logging, and simulate a disaster recovery scenario.