Is it mandatory to have a supported CSI to backup a PVC?

You can use generic backup for non CSI. These leverage side-car containers and push off the data right away to location profiles if I remember correctly

https://docs.kasten.io/latest/install/generic.html?highlight=generic

Thanks @Geoff Burke I’ll test this today, it would be great that we highlighted this at the beginning of the documentation. I was reading the documentation for hours and unable to yield some definitive answers. So, l I gave up and posted the question here.

I think they put that further down in the docs because you would want to use snapshots ideally if possible. I know some folks don’t like sidecar operations because of the extra strain on resources, thinking here about service meshes especially and remember solo pushing ambient mesh because it does not use one. I believe Cilium as well avoids this but I digress. Tell me how it goes. I have done a few and not had any issues but my workloads were just test ones so not very big.