Skip to content

Retour Documentation

Kubernetes-native backup and restore — protect your cluster resources and persistent volumes with declarative CRDs, CSI snapshots, and object storage on any provider.

Contact us for a license — Retour is proprietary software. See License below.

What is Retour?

Retour is a professional backup and disaster recovery solution for Kubernetes. Unlike tools that require you to manually specify every PVC, path, and resource, Retour discovers volumes automatically when you point to a Deployment or StatefulSet. No configuration hassle — just create a Backup CR and Retour handles the rest.

Key Features

Feature Description
Kubernetes-native Backup, Restore, BackupSchedule, StorageBackend, RestoreSync and BackupQuota are Custom Resources
Volume snapshots CSI VolumeSnapshots, with VolumeGroupSnapshots where several volumes must share an instant
Storage backends S3-compatible, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage, and client-side encrypted backends
Verified both ways Backups are checked after upload and restores after copy, by default
Restore drills A schedule can restore its newest backup into a scratch namespace and check it, on its own cron
Immutable backups S3 Object Lock retention on every uploaded object
Incremental forever The kopia engine deduplicates and uploads only what changed
Encryption at rest rclone crypt remotes, with optional KMS or Vault custody of the key material
Scheduled backups Cron-based BackupSchedule with GFS retention and missed-window handling
Resource filtering Include or exclude by name, label, or path, up to whole-cluster scope with dynamic discovery
Warm standby RestoreSync replays a shared backend's backups onto a second cluster
Migration Restore into another cluster or data center, and import existing Velero backups
Web UI Svelte frontend with multi-provider OIDC/SAML authentication

Quick Start

# 1. Create a StorageBackend with Kubernetes Secret (AWS S3)
kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: s3-credentials
  namespace: retour
type: Opaque
stringData:
  access-key-id: "your-access-key"
  secret-access-key: "your-secret-key"
---
apiVersion: retour.thebackup.company/v1
kind: StorageBackend
metadata:
  name: s3-production
  namespace: retour
spec:
  type: s3
  s3:
    bucket: retour-backups
    region: us-east-1
    useSSL: true
    secretRef:
      name: s3-credentials
      keys:
        accessKeyID: access-key-id
        secretAccessKey: secret-access-key
EOF

# 2. Create a Backup
kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: retour.thebackup.company/v1
kind: Backup
metadata:
  name: my-backup
spec:
  storageBackend: s3-production
  namespacedResources:
    - resourceType: Deployment
      namespace: production
      name: webapp
EOF

# 3. Check status
kubectl get backups

Documentation Structure

  • Getting Started — Prerequisites, installation, and your first backup
  • How It Works — Architecture, components, and data flow
  • Tutorials — Step-by-step guides for backup, restore, and schedules
  • CRD Reference — Complete reference for Backup, Restore, BackupSchedule, StorageBackend
  • Examples — Ready-to-use YAML manifests for Backup, Restore, and StorageBackend

License

Retour is proprietary software. To obtain a license or discuss licensing options, contact us at contact@thebackup.company.

Third-party license notices are included in the software distribution and are available for Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) compliance verification.

Offline Access

This documentation is built with Zensical (offline-capable). When deployed with the Retour UI, the docs are available offline — no internet required.