Backup and Restore

Standard Plan Feature

This feature is available in the Standard Plan and above. For more information, see our pricing plans or contact our sales team.

Upbound Crossplane offers a built-in backup and restore feature that lets you configure automatic schedules for taking snapshots of your control planes. You can restore data from these backups in-place or in a new control plane. This guide explains how to use Backup and Restore for disaster recovery or upgrade scenarios.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

• a running Upbound Crossplane control plane cluster
• a valid Standard license applied to your control plane
• resources deployed and managed in the control plane
• Cloud provider credentials

Maintaining a healthy backup cadence is useful to prevent data loss or operational downtime in the event of accidental deletion, human error, or upstream failures.

Backup

A control plane backup object requires:

• a BackupConfig that defines your cloud provider object store and secret
• a Backup that specifies your backup name and deletion policy

UXP can capture your control plane and stores the backup information in a cloud object store with a BackupConfig. Backup operations export:

• Crossplane core .crossplane.io CRDs
• Upbound core .upbound.io CRDs
• CRDs owned by Crossplane packages
• CRDs owned by a CompositeResourceDefinition
• Secrets and ConfigMaps

Backups capture schema definitions and configuration needed to recreate your platform setup, not the actual provisioned resources themselves.

Upbound Crossplane needs a BackupConfig object that defines your provider, the name of your backup bucket and the credentials associated with that cloud account.

Create a BackupConfig

Create a Kubernetes secret with your cloud provider credentials. The example below uses AWS, but Backups are compatible with all major cloud providers.

kubectl create secret generic aws-secret --from-literal=my-aws-secret=<your-credentials>

To backup your control plane to your cloud provider object store, you need to create a BackupConfig and apply it to your cluster:

apiVersion: admin.uxp.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: BackupConfig
metadata:
  name: default
spec:
  objectStorage:
    provider: AWS
    bucket: my-bucket
    config:
      endpoint: s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com
    credentials:
      source: Secret
      secretRef:
        name: aws-secret
        key: my-aws-secret

The required properties of this object are:

• spec.objectStorage to configure the bucket name and object store endpoint
• spec.objectStorage.credentials to pass cloud provider secrets

Create a ClusterRole

Your cluster needs permissions to the upbound-controller-manager component to backup. Create a new ClusterRole for your backup operations:

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: br-role
  labels:
    rbac.crossplane.io/aggregate-to-crossplane: "true"
rules:
- apiGroups:
  - <your_apiGroups>
  resources:
  - "*"
  verbs:
  - "*"

note

Your apiGroups field expects a list of all apiVersions in your Composition.

Create a manual Backup

To capture the control plane state, you need to create a Backup and apply it to your cluster to kick off the actual backup task:

apiVersion: admin.uxp.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: Backup
metadata:
  name: <your_backup_name>
spec:
  configRef:
    name: default
  deletionPolicy: Delete

When you apply this Backup, UXP creates a compressed archive of Crossplane resource manifests and stores them in your configured object storage.

kubectl apply -f my-backup.yaml

Verify the backup:

kubectl get backup
NAME        PHASE       RETRIES   TTL   AGE
my-backup   Completed                   34s

Create a BackupSchedule

You can also create a BackupSchedule to automatically trigger backups based on your BackupConfig.

apiVersion: admin.uxp.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: BackupSchedule
metadata:
  name: <your_backup_name>
spec:
  configRef:
    name: default
  deletionPolicy: Delete
  schedule: '@weekly'

The spec.schedule field is a Cron-formatted string. Some common examples are below:

Entry	Description
@hourly	Run once an hour.
@daily	Run once a day.
@weekly	Run once a week.
0 0/4 * * *	Run every 4 hours.
0/15 * * * 1-5	Run every fifteenth minute on Monday through Friday.
@every 1h30m10s	Run every 1 hour, 30 minutes, and 10 seconds. Hour is the largest measurement of time for @every.

Backup archive storage structure

UXP stores completed backups in the following format:

s3://<bucket>/<prefix>/<backupName or scheduleName>/<timestampedName>/
├── resources.tar.gz – compressed archive of Crossplane resource manifests
└── uxp-backup.yaml – serialized Backup CR manifest for traceability

Restore

A control plane restore operation requires:

• a Restore object to kick off the restore operation

Restoration modes

The two modes for restoring your control plane from a backup are:

1. In-place: Restores your resources into the same control plane cluster. This mode is suitable for disaster recovery or rollback scenarios. All existing resources in the control plane are overwritten by a restore operation.
2. Cross-control plane: Restores your resources into a different control plane cluster. Requires matching versions of UXP.

Create a Restore object

Your Restore object specifies the backup name you specified in the previous step:

apiVersion: admin.uxp.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: Restore
metadata:
  name: my-restore
spec:
  configRef:
    name: default
  backupName: <your_backup_name>-backup

Verify the restore:

kubectl get restore
NAME         PHASE       RETRIES   AGE
my-restore   Completed   2        19s

To verify your resources:

kubectl get composite
NAME       SYNCED   READY   COMPOSITION   AGE
my-app     True     True    app-yaml      94s

Advanced options

Set Time-To-Live

You can set your backup Time-To-Live (TTL) to automate cleanup. In both Backup and BackupSchedule objects, you can add spec.ttl. For example:

apiVersion: admin.uxp.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: Backup
metadata:
  name: <your_backup_name>
spec:
  configRef:
    name: default
  deletionPolicy: Delete
  ttl: 168h # Backup deleted after 7 days

TTL Best Practices

Environment	Recommended TTL	Example Values
Development/Test	Short TTLs	24 to 72 hours
Production	Longer TTLs	7 to 30 days

Resource exclusion

You can customize resources in the backup scope with spec.excludedResources. For example:

apiVersion: admin.uxp.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: Backup
metadata:
  name: <your_backup_name>
spec:
  excludedResources:
  - "XCluster"
  - "XDatabase"
  - "XRolePolicyAttachment"

Deletion policy

You can automate how your backups behave when you delete resources with the deletionPolicy field in your Backup or BackupSchedule objects. For example:

apiVersion: admin.uxp.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: Backup
metadata:
  name: <your_backup_name>
spec:
  configRef:
    name: default
  deletionPolicy: Orphan # Retains the backup in resource deletion

Deletion Policy Best Practices

Deletion Policy	Environment	Use Case	Behavior
Delete	Development/Test	Auto cleanup	Backups deleted when the resource is deleted
Orphan	Production	Long-term archival	Backups retained even if the resource is deleted