Backup anatomy¶
Rancher backup tarballs are gzip-compressed tar archives of Kubernetes object snapshots taken by the rancher-backup operator.
Member naming¶
Each tar member name encodes the resource:
Examples:
clusters.management.cattle.io#v3/c-xxxxx.json
nodes.management.cattle.io#v3/c-xxxxx/m-node.json
clusters.fleet.cattle.io#v1alpha1/fleet-default/c-m-xxxxx.json
Cluster kinds¶
| Kind | Detection |
|---|---|
| rke1 | spec.rancherKubernetesEngineConfig present |
| imported | spec.importedConfig or status.driver=imported |
| rke2-provisioned | spec.rke2Config or spec.k3sConfig |
| local | management cluster running Rancher |
Local cluster¶
The local cluster represents the Rancher management Kubernetes cluster itself. On restore to a new cluster, local objects must be stripped — they are recreated by the new installation.
Ghost IDs¶
Paths may reference cluster IDs that no longer have a clusters.management.cattle.io definition (detached clusters, stale Fleet mappings).
sanitize can auto-detect and remove these when --keep-cluster is set.