# How to Restore Volumes from Snapshots in Kubernetes Clusters

DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) is a Kubernetes service with a fully managed control plane, high availability, and autoscaling. DOKS integrates with standard Kubernetes toolchains and DigitalOcean’s load balancers, volumes, CPU and GPU Droplets, API, and CLI.

In Kubernetes, a volume snapshot is a point-in-time copy of the *contents* of a Kubernetes cluster. You can use snapshots to back up a cluster’s data or copy the data to another resource without needing to create a new volume.

To import an existing snapshot into DigitalOcean as a volume, you need to create a new PVC that refers to the snapshot by calling `kubectl create -f your_restore_file.yaml`. Here’s an example of a YAML file that restores from a snapshot and creates a new PVC for use in the cluster:

```yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: csi-do-test-pvc-restore
spec:
  dataSource:
    name: csi-do-test-snapshot
    kind: VolumeSnapshot
    apiGroup: snapshot.storage.k8s.io
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 5Gi
```