1. Prerequisites

Longhorn installed and healthy (longhorn-system pods ready).

A Backup Target reachable from all Longhorn manager pods:

S3-compatible bucket (with access/secret and optional custom endpoint), or

NFS export (read/write, stable network).

Sufficient free space on the BackupStore.

2.Set the Backup Target

UI (recommended)

1. Open Longhorn UI → Settings → General.

2. Set Backup Target (examples):

• S3: s3://my-bucket@us-east-1/longhorn

• NFS: nfs://10.0.0.20:/export/longhorn-backups

3. If using S3, set Backup Target Credential Secret (Access Key, Secret, Region, Endpoint if non-AWS).

kubectl (advanced)

• Create a Secret with S3 creds in longhorn-system, then patch Settings (keys vary by version). In most cases the UI is simpler and safer.

3. Create Snapshots & Backups

Manual (per volume)

1. Longhorn UI → Volumes → click your volume.

2. Snapshots tab → Create Snapshot (name it).

3. Backups tab → Create Backup from the snapshot (or directly “Backup”).

Recurring (recommended)

• Per volume → Recurring Jobs:

• • Hourly/Daily Snapshot (e.g., keep last 7)
• • Daily/Weekly Backup (e.g., keep last 30)

• Attach the recurring job(s) to the volume (or set globally and opt-in).

4. Verify Backups

UI

• Volume → Backups tab → you should see backup entries with timestamps and sizes.

• Click a backup to view details (labels, CRC, etc.).

Best practice

• Periodically restore a backup to a scratch/test volume and run a quick read/write check.

5. Restore a Backup (New Volume)

UI

1. Longhorn UI → Backups (left menu).

2. Choose the Backup Volume (it groups backups by original volume).

3. Pick the desired Backup → Restore.

4. Set New Volume Name, size (auto from backup), Data Engine, # of replicas, and (optional) Create PV/PVC.

5. Click OK. Longhorn creates the volume and starts rebuilding replicas.

6. When the volume is Healthy, Attach it to a node, then mount it via your workload (or use the auto-created PVC).

Notes

• If you created PV/PVC automatically, just point your Pod/Deployment/StatefulSet to that PVC.

• File system (ext4/xfs) will match the original backup unless you override.

6. Disaster Recovery (Cross-cluster or Failover)

DR Volume approach

1. On the target cluster, configure the same Backup Target.

2. Longhorn UI → Backups → select the source Backup Volume.

3. Click Create Disaster Recovery Volume (DR Volume).

4. Longhorn creates a DR volume that periodically pulls incremental backups.

5. If the source cluster goes down, Activate the DR volume:

• DR Volume → Activate → it becomes a regular volume.

• Attach, and use like normal.

When to use

• For warm standby and faster RTO than restoring from scratch.