Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

So sad to see this happening..

I had just last year prepared a detailed guide for reliable postgre backups to local volume as well as cloud storage, using pgBackRest, for my own projects.. pgBackRest have worked so well for me

https://github.com/freakynit/postgre-backup-and-restore-guid...

Thanks to the author for all the time and effort he put into this project..

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.

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.

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

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.

Wow! pgbackrest was definitely the premier backup solution for postgres when I last looked at the ecosystem properly.

It was the only solution that seemed to take restoring and validating as seriously as “taking a backup” which lead to an unfortunate situation with my employer. (details here: https://blog.dijit.sh/that-time-my-manager-spend-1m-on-a-bac...)

This is really a major loss. :(

> TL;DR: pgBackRest is no longer being maintained. If you fork pgBackRest, please select a new name for your project.

> I imagine at some point pgBackRest will be forked, but that will be a new project with new maintainers, and they will need to build trust the same way we did.

I completely understand having to back out of maintenance on an OSS project, but why also slam the door closed on someone taking over? There may be someone very qualified willing to step up, and that could give your existing users continuity.

This feels analgous to deciding to stop maintaining a community garden, but rather than let your neighbor step up, you decide to salt the ground so it can never grow there again, telling your neighbors "you can pull up my plants and move them, but you can't use all the ground and roots that are already there." It just feels bitter.

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 backup to object storage, unfortunately. And I find the WAL-G documentation very confusing. What I'm looking for is WAL streaming and object storage support, to minimize the amount of data that can be lost and so I don't have to run my own backup server.

been using databasus(https://github.com/databasus/databasus) works pretty well so far.

I use pgbackrest for some databases in production, and it has been VERY good.

Really sad to see this. I had only recently learnt about this project, and was really impressed by it. I was planning to set it up this weekend (via autobase). I've also been under the impression that it's likely to be what powers the backups in RDS, Cloud SQL, etc., but I may have misunderstood.

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

i wish the guy could have made a paid version so he could have continued it. Unfortunately, most people do not want to financially contribute to open source and especially when that open source project becomes a paid product.

Waiting for all the C-level execs saying that "anyway this is not needed, we're going to vibe-code a solution to our production database backups" lol

So sad. We have been using this amazing project extensively

> Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the project viable.

So this was the problem, I thought Snowflake would pick up the sponsorship of this project but since it is a competing database it doesn't really make much sense.

I really wish many critical OSS projects get the sponsorship they need to continue.

Otherwise the software industry is in real trouble.

Forking it just passes the buck onto another maintainer with the same problem, this time without the original creator maintaining it.

Sorry to hear this. Well done for maintaining a successful project for so long.

Mentioned this on X but CockroachDB should sponsor this - their audience is Postgres people and open source contributions can be great marketing.

I have recently configured pgbackrest for our app. :(

Plenty of comments of "So sad I have been using this".

How many actually contributed back to keep it going?

Why not try to find a successor instead of archiving the repo and forbidding the use of the name? I'm sure with a 3.8k stars repo you'll find competent people willing to continue the work.