Another way to completely disable a provider is to set replicas to 0 in the provider's ControllerConfig

@chlunde so we have two options for disaster recovery use-cases:

1. As @bobh66 mentioned, setting the replicas to 0 for the ControllerConfig.
2. Setting the pause annotation for specific resources: https://crossplane.io/docs/v1.10/concepts/managed-resources.html#pausing-reconciliations.

Would that be sufficient for your use-cases? If not would you mind elaborating why not.

@luebken my main worry when doing use cases such as

• restoring a cluster (recreate, partial restore, go back in time for a namespace) with thousands of managed resources
• restore an external resource from backup and then restore and re-attach it to a managed resource

would be that due to some unforeseen issue:

• many resources are doubly created, for example due to generateName we get role-HASH2 when we had role-HASH1. For example if just restoring a claim and the composition rendering does not use predicatable name/external-name.
• resources are garbage collected, and then, deleted if we only restore managed resource without claims

So I would like to pause Create/Update/Delete but not Observe to ensure everything is as expected. Pause (as implemented today) would not give any comfort similar to a terraform plan, but this might do that.