How to Backup a Specific Persistent Volume (PV) Using Labels or Name?

[younsl]

Environment

• EKS v1.32
• velero-plugin-for-aws: v1.10.0
• velero: v1.15.2 (installed by official helm chart)

Issue

Is there a way to back up only a specific Persistent Volume (PV) based on its name or label?

I attempted to filter and back up a PV using a label, as shown below:

velero backup create n8n \
  --include-cluster-scoped-resources persistentvolumes \
  --selector argocd.argoproj.io/instance=n8n

Backup request "n8n" submitted successfully.  
Run `velero backup describe n8n` or `velero backup logs n8n` for more details.
However, after checking the backup result, the filtering does not seem to work as expected. I manually added the label argocd.argoproj.io/instance=n8n to the PV resource.

Resource List from the Backup:

  apps/v1/Deployment:
    - n8n/n8n
  discovery.k8s.io/v1/EndpointSlice:
    - n8n/n8n-8r5p4
  networking.k8s.io/v1/Ingress:
    - n8n/n8n
  v1/ConfigMap:
    - n8n/n8n
  v1/Endpoints:
    - n8n/n8n
  v1/Namespace:
    - n8n
  v1/PersistentVolumeClaim:
    - n8n/n8n
  v1/Pod:
    - n8n/n8n-649c948665-hhvxz
  v1/Service:
    - n8n/n8n
  v1/ServiceAccount:
    - n8n/n8n

The PV is not included in the backup. Is there a way to filter and back up only a specific PV based on its label or resource name?

[younsl]

The current environment is EKS with Velero 1.15.2, installed using a Helm chart. In this setup, the PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) with the label name: gitea-shared-storage needs to be backed up along with its associated PersistentVolume (PV). The PVC must have this label, but the PV does not require it. If the PVC references a PV, the PV will still be included in the backup even without the label.

To ensure the PV is backed up, the flag --include-cluster-resources=true must be added to the velero backup command. This explicitly tells Velero to capture cluster-level resources like PVs. The following command initiates the backup:

velero backup create velero-gitea-persistence-volume-test \
  --include-cluster-resources=true \
  --include-resources pv,pvc \
  --include-namespaces gitea \
  --selector "name=gitea-shared-storage"

After running the backup, the result can be checked using:

velero backup describe velero-gitea-persistence-volume-test --details

Total items to be backed up:  2
Items backed up:              2

Resource List:
  v1/PersistentVolume:
    - pvc-b6ec150e-5bfd-4faf-a2f8-ed217b85f587
  v1/PersistentVolumeClaim:
    - gitea/gitea-shared-storage

Backup Volumes:
  Velero-Native Snapshots:
    pvc-b6ec150e-5bfd-4faf-a2f8-ed217b85f587:
      Snapshot ID:        snap-08cc68e11c5787af6
      Type:               gp3
      Availability Zone:  ap-northeast-2c
      IOPS:               0
      Result:             succeeded

From the output, it is confirmed that the PVC named gitea/gitea-shared-storage has been backed up, along with its corresponding PV pvc-b6ec150e-5bfd-4faf-a2f8-ed217b85f587. The backup was completed using a Velero-native snapshot, and the snapshot details show that the snapshot ID is snap-08cc68e11c5787af6, with a volume type of gp3, located in the ap-northeast-2c availability zone. The backup result indicates that the snapshot was successfully created.

To verify the backup at the infrastructure level, the AWS EC2 console can be checked for an EBS snapshot corresponding to the backed-up PV.