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Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

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41–50 of 245 posts

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#41
pgbackrest is the most versatile piece of backup technology for PostgreSQL and in my experience the other products do not come close.

I am therefore quite sad to see this happen. It won't be easy to get feature parity with this great product.

I sincerely hope this is a reversible decision, or perhaps the postgres project could even absorb it into contrib.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#42
post #31

Plenty of comments of "So sad I have been using this". How many actually contributed back to keep it going?

It's such a strawman to claim that you cannot be sad if something disappears where you have not financially or you work contributed. Someone can say that they are sad that the Notre Dame burned down even if they haven't personally contributed to Notre Dame.

That comparison is fallacious too, I think.

Something burning down is a tragedy, beyond anyone's control. It's also possible to love something for its beauty, and be sad that a globally historic monument suffered such an act of god that the irreplaceable art and craftsmanship is gone forever.

Something closing down, perhaps because there was not enough money to sustain its continued operation, when tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people were using it? That's a perfectly appropriate time to remind folks, "if you like free software, consider donating to help sustain the almost full-time effort it takes to keep packages like this alive."

Op said, "this is sad [because] I've been using this," and the implication is, "I want to keep using this but now I can't because it's gone" and making the connection that "one way to prevent this from happening to other packages you like is to contribute financially."

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#43

I was about to set up Postgres backups with pgbackrest very soon. It looked like the most mature solution for my use case. What I was aiming for was continuous backups to an object storage provider, without a central DB server but the backup tool directly installed on the Postgres server. I'll have to look at the alternatives again, I think that was mostly WAL-G and Barman. It looks like Barman doesn't support direct…

This is exactly what I was setting it up to do this morning. My research came down to this and WAL-G for the same reasons, and I picked pgBackRest over WAL-G because the documentation was clearer.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#44
Open Source has worked fine here. The author doesn't find financial support for the work, so they just want to change winds and that's a perfectly fine path forward.

If this is really much more than a personal project "for fun, on my leisure time", and it became an actually serious product-level project that provides good value in commercial environments for people, there's clearly an opportunity for a for-profit company to step in and cover that niche. But that'd require that users became customers and actually departed from their money to pay for it :)

I guess most will switch instead to asking who's the next project maintainer to work on it, to whom the new bug reports and complaints can continue to be sent for free. But if there's money to be made by using a tool, there should be money paid for using it too. We "just" need to find the new generation of FOSS Financial Sustainability solutions that actually work! Donations don't make the cut.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish projects like this didn't fall through the cracks and continued to be funded. The struggles of OSS are too real.

True.. I truly wish wish we had better open-source license and more open-source projects adopt it.. Tiered pricing license... tiering based upon annual company revenues... should start super low for small companies (free for individuals), and jump to thousands of dollars per year for 10+ milion revenue companies. I understand that this might not fully be in the spirit of open-source, but, what's happening currently i…

Sigh. Bane of my existence is any service which does this.

My org theoretically makes hundreds of millions, unfortunately none of that money is ours. So I get forced into a procurement process for anything that costs more than (ridiculously small limit), and get stuck using the worst in class because it's cheaper.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a strawman to claim that you cannot be sad if something disappears where you have not financially or you work contributed. Someone can say that they are sad that the Notre Dame burned down even if they haven't personally contributed to Notre Dame.

That comparison is fallacious too, I think. Something burning down is a tragedy, beyond anyone's control. It's also possible to love something for its beauty, and be sad that a globally historic monument suffered such an act of god that the irreplaceable art and craftsmanship is gone forever. Something closing down, perhaps because there was not enough money to sustain its continued operation, when tens of thousands…

Alright, take a park closing then. Can you be sad about that if you haven't personally raised money to finance the park?

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#47
post #22

Wow, this is pretty surprising, I was under the impression that this is the leading PG backup/recovery tool. Anybody know how WAL-G and Barman compare? https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g https://github.com/EnterpriseDB/barman

We've been happy with WAL-E and now WAL-G (successor). The streaming PITR nature of these won over pgbackrest when we did the analysis ~9 years ago.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#48
post #25

I have a moderately sized 2TB production database I have enjoyed using pgBackRest on, and was—this week—going to set it up on another 8TB database we have. What's the next-closest thing? wal-g? barman? databasus? I only get to cosplay as a DBA.

databasus does not do PITR.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#49

Ah, sad to read this. Does anyone know of good alternatives?

Postgres has built-in backups starting with version 18.

From what I can find Postgres 17 [1] introduced incremental backups to pg_basebackup, refined in 18, but nowhere near the full featureset of pgBackRest. Is that what you meant? Having builtin incremental replication to a S3-compatible storage would be great.

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/release/17.0/#:~:text=pg%5Fb...

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#50
post #25

I have a moderately sized 2TB production database I have enjoyed using pgBackRest on, and was—this week—going to set it up on another 8TB database we have. What's the next-closest thing? wal-g? barman? databasus? I only get to cosplay as a DBA.

I've used barman on somewhat large-ish DBs (30+ TB), and had no complaints with it. I am a DBRE, if that holds any weight.
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