What steps did you take and what happened:

We use velero to backup custom resources on a workerless kubernetes cluster (does not contain "Deployment" or "Pod" resources). Velero itself runs on another cluster with worker nodes and targets the workerless cluster for backups. Restoring the backups worked perfectly fine until Velero 1.16, which introduced a change in the PodVolumeRestoreAction. Now running this:

velero restore create --from-backup xxx --exclude-resources pods

results in the following error:

time="2025-09-11T08:53:54Z" level=error msg="Velero restore error: rpc error: code = Unknown desc = no matches for kind \"Deployment\" in version \"apps/v1\"" logSource="pkg/controller/restore_controller.go:602" restore=velero/xxx

Origin of the error:

https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero/blob/main/pkg/restore/actions/pod_volume_restore_action.go#L64

What did you expect to happen:

Restore runs fine.

The following information will help us better understand what's going on:

If you are using velero v1.7.0+:
Please use velero debug --backup <backupname> --restore <restorename> to generate the support bundle, and attach to this issue, more options please refer to velero debug --help

-> does not work because of similar reason
fails on workerless cluster with
velero debug --backup xxx --restore yyy An error occurred: failed to check velero deployment: no matches for kind "Deployment" in version "apps/v1"
fails on regular cluster with
velero debug --backup xxx --restore yyy An error occurred: no matches for kind "Backup" in version "velero.io/v1"

• velero backup describe <backupname> or kubectl get backup/<backupname> -n velero -o yaml
• https://gist.github.com/nweisenauer-sap/efe0dbd6b6e4e6a440f4f63b4d57fd64
• velero restore describe <restorename> or kubectl get restore/<restorename> -n velero -o yaml
• https://gist.github.com/nweisenauer-sap/fb82d7d9625cdbe35ec2e16ebf002d3a
• velero restore logs <restorename>
• https://gist.github.com/nweisenauer-sap/2228f5473205d9ccb18c4d6c76e865d7

Environment:

• Velero version (use velero version):
• Client:
  Version: v1.16.2
  Git commit: -
  Server:
  Version: v1.16.2
• Velero features (use velero client config get features):
• features:
• Kubernetes version (use kubectl version):
• Client Version: v1.34.1
  Kustomize Version: v5.7.1
  Server Version: v1.33.3

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