Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL
#2This is a fantastic project that a lot of self-hosters using PostgreSQL use. Specially with pgBackRest archived by the owner on Apr 27, 2026, this is likely the leading option that has been around the block for a while.
Anyone here had considered Barman in the past, used it for a while and went to pgBackRest? Are you revisiting that decision now?
Re: Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL
#3This is a fantastic project that a lot of self-hosters using PostgreSQL use. Specially with pgBackRest archived by the owner on Apr 27, 2026, this is likely the leading option that has been around the block for a while. Anyone here had considered Barman in the past, used it for a while and went to pgBackRest? Are you revisiting that decision now?
A side note on pgBackRest: PGX created a fork and announced to maintain it under the name pgxbackup:
https://thebuild.com/blog/2026/05/01/pgxbackup-continuity-su...
Re: Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL
#4We use Barman inside Kubernetes via CloudNativePG's plugin, as it is the default backup plugin.
Barman has always been solid for backup and restore, however configuring backup in CNPG is a little more interesting - WAL limits need to be set carefully or you just end up filling WAL volumes and the database becoming unavailable.
Re: Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL
#5We use Barman inside Kubernetes via CloudNativePG's plugin, as it is the default backup plugin. Barman has always been solid for backup and restore, however configuring backup in CNPG is a little more interesting - WAL limits need to be set carefully or you just end up filling WAL volumes and the database becoming unavailable.
> We use Barman inside Kubernetes via CloudNativePG's plugin, as it is the default backup plugin.
right and here's why CloudNativePG chose Barman over pgBackRest: https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/cloudnative-pg/issues/3077
> WAL limits need to be set carefully or you just end up filling WAL volumes and the database becoming unavailable.
This is true. For anyone getting alarmed that this is due to a bug in PostgreSQL, it's not - it's PostgreSQL protecting the customer from attempting to write data that it cannot durable commit - "I am going to go unavailable because I don't have enough space to save more data".
There are multiple ways to handle this, the easiest, most hands on way is to keep a monitor and alert that watches the WAL size like a hawk and then alerts OPS the moment it breaches a threshold.
Re: Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL
#6Last time I checked, Barman didn't support backups to S3. That's why (for us) pgBackRest was such a big deal: it could offload full and incremental backups to a basically limitless and reliable medium.
I think (and I'm probably wrong now) that Barman only could push backups to another Linux machine (e.g., EC2 box), so you had to worry about your backup system _on top_ of the main DB.
So I'm really hoping someone will pickup maintaining pgBackRest.
Re: Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL
#7This is a fantastic project that a lot of self-hosters using PostgreSQL use. Specially with pgBackRest archived by the owner on Apr 27, 2026, this is likely the leading option that has been around the block for a while. Anyone here had considered Barman in the past, used it for a while and went to pgBackRest? Are you revisiting that decision now?
It looks like pgBackRest will likely continue, multiple companies are stepping up with sponsorships. Mentioning this just in case anyone is making plans to move away, it's probably worth waiting a bit for things to settle.
Re: Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL
#8Last time I checked, Barman didn't support backups to S3. That's why (for us) pgBackRest was such a big deal: it could offload full and incremental backups to a basically limitless and reliable medium. I think (and I'm probably wrong now) that Barman only could push backups to another Linux machine (e.g., EC2 box), so you had to worry about your backup system _on top_ of the main DB. So I'm really hoping someone will…
Something like Rclone and a cron job, or else s3 mounted via FUSE, could possibly bridge that. Of course then you have to worry about reliability of the bridge...
Re: Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL
#9This is a fantastic project that a lot of self-hosters using PostgreSQL use. Specially with pgBackRest archived by the owner on Apr 27, 2026, this is likely the leading option that has been around the block for a while. Anyone here had considered Barman in the past, used it for a while and went to pgBackRest? Are you revisiting that decision now?
One interesting thing about Barman is that it just uses PG's own backup utilities. It doesn't implement custom parsers and things like that. So, there's less maintenance work needed for Barman when PostgreSQL changes data-file internals. Tradeoff is that there's less custom optimization than pgBackRest/pg_probackup/WAL-G-local.
Databasus seems to be taking somewhat similar approach to Barman, but (at this time) does not appear to use pg_receivewal, which makes it less efficient than Barman.
For PG v17+, Barman seems to be the most efficient backup solution based on PG native tools, that is able to do low-RPO or even zero-RPO (if configured as a synchronous receiver).
Re: Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL
#10Last time I checked, Barman didn't support backups to S3. That's why (for us) pgBackRest was such a big deal: it could offload full and incremental backups to a basically limitless and reliable medium. I think (and I'm probably wrong now) that Barman only could push backups to another Linux machine (e.g., EC2 box), so you had to worry about your backup system _on top_ of the main DB. So I'm really hoping someone will…
There are other ways to mount S3, but you may want to check out Amazon's new product, S3 files:
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/04/amazon-s3...