Hello!
A simple answer is no. The situation you have described poses challenges for restoring the Pulp server with only partial backups.
Without backing up the pulp_storage , which could contain the synchronized RPM packages, you risk losing crucial content data. While you mentioned that these repositories are mainly synchronized from remotes, there could still be locally uploaded content or metadata that will not be recoverable without the pulp_storage . Am I right? Thus, a straightforward restore would not be possible without it.
However, there might be some scenarios where a partial backup could suffice. Suppose you synchronized all the repositories with the on-demand policy. If the RPM plugin does not store (it would be interesting to hear this from plugin developers themselves) any content data on the storage for respective packages, and downloads them when needed, you should be fine as long as the reference to the remote server is established. After the restore, this could resemble the state where you have a repository with remote artifacts pointing to the remote source and you ran the reclaim space task to free up the disk space.
You may want to consider using the import/export workflow to create a backup plan too. This is not what we usually advise to do but it should work out of the box. Note that this partially backs up the pulp_storage into a single bundle.
For further insights and discussions on disaster recovery strategies with Pulp, you might find this thread helpful: Proof of Concept (PoC) for the Pulp project and its implementation in a high availability (HA) setup with a focus on disaster recovery (DR).
Feel free to ask if you have any more questions or need further clarification.
