Change the Reclaim Policy of a PersistentVolume

    You need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. It is recommended to run this tutorial on a cluster with at least two nodes that are not acting as control plane hosts. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using or you can use one of these Kubernetes playgrounds:

    To check the version, enter .

    PersistentVolumes can have various reclaim policies, including “Retain”, “Recycle”, and “Delete”. For dynamically provisioned PersistentVolumes, the default reclaim policy is “Delete”. This means that a dynamically provisioned volume is automatically deleted when a user deletes the corresponding PersistentVolumeClaim. This automatic behavior might be inappropriate if the volume contains precious data. In that case, it is more appropriate to use the “Retain” policy. With the “Retain” policy, if a user deletes a PersistentVolumeClaim, the corresponding PersistentVolume will not be deleted. Instead, it is moved to the Released phase, where all of its data can be manually recovered.

    1. Choose one of your PersistentVolumes and change its reclaim policy:

      Note:

      On Windows, you must double quote any JSONPath template that contains spaces (not single quote as shown above for bash). This in turn means that you must use a single quote or escaped double quote around any literals in the template. For example:

      1. kubectl patch pv <your-pv-name> -p "{\"spec\":{\"persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy\":\"Retain\"}}"

    2. Verify that your chosen PersistentVolume has the right policy:

      1. pvc-b6efd8da-b7b5-11e6-9d58-0ed433a7dd94   4Gi        RWO           Delete          Bound     default/claim1    manual                     40s
      2. pvc-b95650f8-b7b5-11e6-9d58-0ed433a7dd94   4Gi        RWO           Delete          Bound     default/claim2    manual                     36s

      In the preceding output, you can see that the volume bound to claim default/claim3 has reclaim policy Retain. It will not be automatically deleted when a user deletes claim default/claim3.

    • PersistentVolume
      • Pay attention to the .spec.persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy of PersistentVolume.