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title: Restoring Rancher Installed on a K3s Kubernetes Cluster
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When Rancher is installed on a high-availability Kubernetes cluster, we recommend using an external database to store the cluster data.

The database administrator will need to back up the external database, or restore it from a snapshot or dump.

We recommend configuring the database to take recurring snapshots.

### Creating Snapshots and Restoring Databases from Snapshots

For details on taking database snapshots and restoring your database from them, refer to the official database documentation:

- [Official MySQL documentation](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/replication-snapshot-method.html)
- [Official PostgreSQL documentation](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/backup-dump.html)
- [Official etcd documentation](https://etcd.io/docs/v3.3/op-guide/recovery/)