f84c8357d4
NOTE TO PACKAGERS: A new distribution tarball is available which simplifies the build process by providing pregenerated HTML documentation, man page, and code. The tarball is attached to each release as an asset and is named pgbackrest-{version}.tar.gz. See the README.md in the tarball for details. Please use the new distribution tarball to avoid the additional build tooling required to generate code in future releases.
NOTE TO PACKAGERS: There is a new optional dependency on libsystemd.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Starting with this release, only the restore command may be run as root by default. Use allow-root to run other commands as root (though this is not recommended).
Bug Fixes:
* Fix expire removing a backup in progress on another host. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by Dmitrii.)
* Fix archive-push-queue-max not enforced when a WAL file errors. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by vut12.)
* Fix async archive-get failure during recovery across a timeline switch. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by Jimmy Yih.)
* Fix potential buffer overrun in error module. (Fixed by Christophe Pettus. Reviewed by David Steele.)
* Fix use-after-free of parallel protocol client. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by Georgy Shelkovy.)
* Fix heap overflow when a pg option is set without pg1. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by Naveen.)
Features:
* PostgreSQL 19beta2 support. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
* Add archive-expire-before option to clean up WAL archive. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)
* Add batch delete for Azure storage. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley, Crispy.)
* Add support for S3 Outposts. (Contributed by Shiva Kumar Ambigi. Reviewed by David Steele, Roberto Mello.)
* Add S3 process authentication. (Reviewed by Andrew Charlton. Suggested by Andrew Charlton.)
Improvements:
* Reconnect SFTP storage after the server drops an idle connection. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by mustafa0x, tisserat.)
* Add user/group caching for faster manifest build. (Contributed by Gunnar Lindholm. Reviewed by David Steele.)
* Add per-repo backup progress to info command output. (Contributed by Will Morland. Reviewed by David Steele, Stefan Fercot.)
* Add backup.info checks to verify command. (Contributed by Denis Garsh. Reviewed by David Steele, Douglas J Hunley.)
* Allow the S3 STS endpoint to be configured. (Contributed by Simon Gratton. Reviewed by David Steele.)
* Add archive-push-batch-size to limit WAL pushed per asynchronous run. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
* Exit async archive-push on first error. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Lardière Sébastien.)
* Harden HTTP chunked response parsing. (Contributed by Shubham. Reviewed by David Steele.)
* Error when running as root unless allow-root is enabled. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley.)
* Fewer binary searches when building manifest. (Contributed by Gunnar Lindholm. Reviewed by David Steele.)
* Improve seek performance during block incremental delta restore. (Reviewed by David Christensen, Douglas J Hunley.)
* Bundle backup files in order rather than scanning for a better fit. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
* Report the underlying error when a query fails to complete. (Reviewed by Andrew Pogrebnoi. Suggested by Marco Fontana.)
* Report the actual error when an S3 credential request fails. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by Mitchell Grice.)
* Report archive-push spool path errors to the PostgreSQL log. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by Don Seiler.)
* Hint that pgBackRest may be out of date when a version is unsupported.
* Add systemd notify integration. (Contributed by Andrew Jackson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
* Suppress unused parameter errors in meson compiler probes. (Contributed by Jörg Plate. Reviewed by David Steele.)
* C11 is now the minimum C standard. (Reviewed by Mohammad Ali Nazir Kosar.)
Documentation Improvements:
* Make stanza option internal for the repo-* commands. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
* Document that info reads encryption settings from global section. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Ron Johnson.)
* Document that expire-auto uses the backup command configuration. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Lardière Sébastien.)
* Document adjusting the logrotate su directive for a dedicated user. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by lkanbus.)
* Document that end-of-line comments are not supported in config files. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by Alex Richman.)
Test Suite Improvements:
* Fix Alpine group conflicts in CI containers. (Contributed by Artur Zakirov. Reviewed by David Steele.)
9.8 KiB
pgBackRest
Reliable PostgreSQL Backup & Restore
Introduction
pgBackRest is a reliable backup and restore solution for PostgreSQL that seamlessly scales up to the largest databases and workloads.
pgBackRest v2.59.0 is the current stable release. Release notes are on the Releases page.
Please give us a star on GitHub if you like pgBackRest!
News
July 20, 2026 - New Distribution Tarball
July 20, 2026 - pgBackRest 2.59.0 Released
May 18, 2026 - pgBackRest Will Continue!
Sponsors
pgBackRest would not exist without sponsorship. Writing new features, fixing bugs, reviewing contributions, answering questions from the community, and maintenance all take a considerable amount of time. Please consider a sponsorship if you use pgBackRest in your enterprise.
Our sponsors: AWS, Supabase, pgEdge, Tiger Data, Percona, Eon, Xata, Dalibo, Data Egret.
We are grateful to our sponsors for investing in open-source infrastructure that benefits the entire PostgreSQL community.
Past sponsors: Crunchy Data, Resonate.
Features
Parallel Backup & Restore
Compression is usually the bottleneck during backup operations so pgBackRest solves this problem with parallel processing and more efficient compression algorithms such as lz4 and zstd.
Local or Remote Operation
A custom protocol allows pgBackRest to backup, restore, and archive locally or remotely via TLS/SSH with minimal configuration. An interface to query PostgreSQL is also provided via the protocol layer so that remote access to PostgreSQL is never required, which enhances security.
Multiple Repositories
Multiple repositories allow, for example, a local repository with minimal retention for fast restores and a remote repository with a longer retention for redundancy and access across the enterprise.
Full, Differential, & Incremental Backups (at File or Block Level)
Full, differential, and incremental backups are supported. pgBackRest is not susceptible to the time resolution issues of rsync, making differential and incremental backups safe without the requirement to checksum each file. Block-level backups save space by only copying the parts of files that have changed.
Backup Rotation & Archive Expiration
Retention policies can be set for full and differential backups to create coverage for any time frame. The WAL archive can be maintained for all backups or strictly for the most recent backups. In the latter case WAL required to make older backups consistent will be maintained in the archive.
Backup Integrity
Checksums are calculated for every file in the backup and rechecked during a restore or verify. After a backup finishes copying files, it waits until every WAL segment required to make the backup consistent reaches the repository.
Backups in the repository may be stored in the same format as a standard PostgreSQL cluster (including tablespaces). If compression is disabled and hard links are enabled it is possible to snapshot a backup in the repository and bring up a PostgreSQL cluster directly on the snapshot. This is advantageous for terabyte-scale databases that are time consuming to restore in the traditional way.
All operations utilize file and directory level fsync to ensure durability.
Page Checksums
If page checksums are enabled pgBackRest will validate the checksums for every file that is copied during a backup. All page checksums are validated during a full backup and checksums in files that have changed are validated during differential and incremental backups.
Validation failures do not stop the backup process, but warnings with details of exactly which pages have failed validation are output to the console and file log.
This feature allows page-level corruption to be detected early, before backups that contain valid copies of the data have expired.
Backup Resume
An interrupted backup can be resumed from the point where it was stopped. Files that were already copied are compared with the checksums in the manifest to ensure integrity. Since this operation can take place entirely on the repository host, it reduces load on the PostgreSQL host and saves time since checksum calculation is faster than compressing and retransmitting data.
Streaming Compression & Checksums
Compression and checksum calculations are performed in stream while files are being copied to the repository, whether the repository is located locally or remotely.
If the repository is on a repository host, compression is performed on the PostgreSQL host and files are transmitted in a compressed format and simply stored on the repository host. When compression is disabled a lower level of compression is utilized to make efficient use of available bandwidth while keeping CPU cost to a minimum.
Delta Restore
The manifest contains checksums for every file in the backup so that during a restore it is possible to use these checksums to speed processing enormously. On a delta restore any files not present in the backup are first removed and then checksums are generated for the remaining files. Files that match the backup are left in place and the rest of the files are restored as usual. Parallel processing can lead to a dramatic reduction in restore times.
Parallel, Asynchronous WAL Push & Get
Dedicated commands are included for pushing WAL to the archive and getting WAL from the archive. Both commands support parallelism to accelerate processing and run asynchronously to provide the fastest possible response time to PostgreSQL.
WAL push automatically detects WAL segments that are pushed multiple times and de-duplicates when the segment is identical, otherwise an error is raised. Asynchronous WAL push allows transfer to be offloaded to another process which compresses WAL segments in parallel for maximum throughput. This can be a critical feature for databases with extremely high write volume.
Asynchronous WAL get maintains a local queue of WAL segments that are decompressed and ready for replay. This reduces the time needed to provide WAL to PostgreSQL which maximizes replay speed. Higher-latency connections and storage (such as S3) benefit the most.
The push and get commands both ensure that the database and repository match by comparing PostgreSQL versions and system identifiers. This virtually eliminates the possibility of misconfiguring the WAL archive location.
Tablespace & Link Support
Tablespaces are fully supported and on restore tablespaces can be remapped to any location. It is also possible to remap all tablespaces to one location with a single command which is useful for development restores.
File and directory links are supported for any file or directory in the PostgreSQL cluster. When restoring it is possible to restore all links to their original locations, remap some or all links, or restore some or all links as normal files or directories within the cluster directory.
S3, Azure, and GCS Compatible Object Store Support
pgBackRest repositories can be located in S3, Azure, and GCS compatible object stores to allow for virtually unlimited capacity and retention.
Encryption
pgBackRest can encrypt the repository to secure backups wherever they are stored.
Ransomware & Malware Protection
When the repository is stored on versioned object storage, pgBackRest can read the repository as it was at a point-in-time. If backups are deleted or corrupted by accident, malware, or ransomware, a target time can be used to recover data from before the damage occurred.
Versioning is supported by S3, Azure, and GCS compatible object stores. Object locking for S3 and soft delete for GCS or Azure can provide additional protection against tampering.
Compatibility with ten versions of PostgreSQL
pgBackRest includes support for ten versions of PostgreSQL, the five supported versions and the last five EOL versions. This allows ample time to upgrade to a supported version.
Getting Started
pgBackRest strives to be easy to configure and operate:
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User guides for various operating systems and PostgreSQL versions.
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Command reference for command-line operations.
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Configuration reference for creating pgBackRest configurations.
Contributions
Contributions to pgBackRest are always welcome! Please see our Contributing Guidelines for details on how to contribute features, improvements or issues.
Support
pgBackRest is completely free and open source under the MIT license. You may use it for personal or commercial purposes without any restrictions whatsoever. Bug reports are taken very seriously and will be addressed as quickly as possible. Please report bugs here.
Creating a robust disaster recovery policy with proper replication and backup strategies can be a very complex and daunting task. You may find that you need help during the architecture phase and ongoing support to ensure that your enterprise continues running smoothly.
Our sponsors offer products and services that include pgBackRest support and can help with your disaster recovery needs.