Restore PersistentVolumeClaim

Restore a deleted persistent volume claim

If the persistent volume claim was accidentally deleted, and the persistent volume is still present (status Released), you can restore the PVC and PV by performing the following actions:

Make sure there is no persistent volume claim (pvc) present for this volume (pv) (e.g. if you provisoned a new one with the same name, resulting in a new empty persistent volume)
Modify the persistent volume claim reference
Create a new PVC, with volumeName pointing to the PV

Requirement

Note that for this to be possible, your persisent volume needs to be configured with a reclaim policy Retain.
If it's configured with Delete, your persistent volume will be deleted and you need to restore from a back-up, such as volumesnapshots or other methods.

Steps

Validate the PersistentVolume

C that the persistent volume has the status Released. Do this by using:

$ kubectl get pv
NAME                                       CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   RECLAIM POLICY   STATUS     CLAIM                                      STORAGECLASS    REASON   AGE
pvc-1d6cb933-2706-4471-9a89-e895a9cf3439   4Gi        RWO            Retain           Released   default/test-database                      gp2-immediate            50d

If it's not released but for example Bound, a pvc is still present for this volume. You will note that CLAIM still has the previous PVC name present.

Edit the persistent volume, which is marked as Released. If the Persistent Volume is marked as Available, no other action needs to be taken. If it is marked as any other value, do not modify the claimRef. You may need to perform step 1 first.

$ kubectl edit pv <persistent-volume>;

Edit this block from the persistent volume that you want to link to the new persistent volume claim:

claimRef:
  apiVersion: v1
  kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
  name: test-database
  namespace: default
  resourceVersion: "68569655"
  uid: f4a2f6c4-316c-4b7a-952c-c7f51a8ec354

Remove the fields resourceVersion and uid.
Update the name and namespace if necessary. These refer to the new pvc you will be creating. Usually these will be the same as before.

Claim the persistent volume

To claim the persistent volume, create a new PVC, which references the persistent volume. Note that volumeName is the name of the persistent volume in the example below.

If this PVC is part of a chart install, you may need to include the meta.helm.sh labels and annotations as well. They are present in the example, but needn't be present if the original PVC was not installed or managed with helm.

Create the PVC:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  annotations:
    meta.helm.sh/release-name: test
    meta.helm.sh/release-namespace: default
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: Helm
  name: test-database
  namespace: default
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteMany
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 4Gi
  storageClassName: gp2-immediate
  volumeMode: Filesystem
  volumeName: d6cb933-2706-4471-9a89-e895a9cf3439

Validate

To validate the actions have been performed correctly, you query the available persistent volumes. It should now should the PV marked as Bound. The PVC should display the correct PV name.

kubectl get pv,pvc;