etcd

Two artifacts hide under 'Kubernetes backup' and they recover different things. The misses are what decides whether a restore works: volume bytes, encryption keys, and everything that never lived in etcd at all.

One disk metric explaining a whole cluster's weirdness is the point of this question. Restarting etcd first turns a slow cluster into a down one, because a restarted member has to catch up before it can vote.

The disk is not full, the keyspace quota is. Defragmenting without disarming the alarm leaves the cluster read-only, and disarming without compacting puts it back within minutes.

Four tools that solve the same sentence and differ on one question: where does the plaintext end up? In a regulated environment that question decides the answer.

Leases prevent dead holders but not overlapping ones. The staff-level answer is fencing tokens and a candid account of why quorum lock services without downstream checks are still probabilistic.