Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained
102 points by c0l0 2 hours ago | 34 comments

joshmn 15 minutes ago
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.

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freakynit 17 minutes ago
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..

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2ndorderthought 11 minutes ago
I really wish projects like this didn't fall through the cracks and continued to be funded. The struggles of OSS are too real.
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freakynit 4 minutes ago
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 is way worse.. where giant companies rip off the hardwork of open-source software maintainers without compsensating them adequately.

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Nelkins 19 minutes ago
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

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noosphr 14 minutes ago
>Wow, this is pretty surprising, I was under the impression that this is the leading PG backup/recovery tool.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

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pjmlp 5 minutes ago
Plenty of comments of "So sad I have been using this".

How many actually contributed back to keep it going?

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LetMeLogin 57 seconds ago
I am not sure why are you gatekeeping this? People can't comment now that they are sad because of what happened?
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dijit 13 minutes ago
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. :(

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fabian2k 34 minutes ago
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.

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timwis 49 minutes ago
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.
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hauxir 20 minutes ago
been using databasus(https://github.com/databasus/databasus) works pretty well so far.
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nailer 13 minutes ago
Mentioned this on X but CockroachDB should sponsor this - their audience is Postgres people and open source contributions can be great marketing.
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evertheylen 42 minutes ago
Ah, sad to read this. Does anyone know of good alternatives?
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DeathArrow 5 minutes ago
Postgres has built-in backups starting with version 18.
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bobkb 25 minutes ago
So sad. We have been using this amazing project extensively
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colesantiago 35 minutes ago
> 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.

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wg0 22 minutes ago
Very simple. Name it to pgbackrest-AI and add the line:

"AI driven backups with smartest world class models optimizing every byte stored via deep AI analysis."

With that added, a million dollars is just chimp change. YC alone would be adding them to all the seasons multiple times over summer, winter and monsoon etc.

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oulipo2 44 minutes ago
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
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duskdozer 23 minutes ago
Why even waste all this time and money on backups in the first place? Just don't make mistakes.
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absynth 28 minutes ago
The backups will then be hyper-optimized from three hours down to 5 minutes using devnull compression technologies. Its super effective!
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theandrewbailey 14 minutes ago
Only for their AI to delete the production database and all the backups, and be forced to write an apology.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911524

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philipallstar 52 minutes ago
Sorry to hear this. Well done for maintaining a successful project for so long.
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DeathArrow 17 minutes ago
I have recently configured pgbackrest for our app. :(
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hleszek 42 minutes ago
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.
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bayindirh 25 minutes ago
Sometimes you want to hang things to your wall, and be done with it.

I'd personally do the same. I wouldn't want to be bothered by the future maintainers' choices and get feedback/flak for it. It's a well-known and well-respected way to cycle the name with a "-ng" or "-nx" prefix to signal that this is the newer project with a different set of maintainers.

Being MIT, while is not my favorite license, doesn't give free license to grab and run with things.

Honestly, in my eyes, 3.8K or 38K stars mean nothing, because Open Source is not about you [0], to begin with.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

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c0balt 37 minutes ago
It is reasonable to ask for a follow-up project/fork to take a different name. Naming your project, e. G., pgbackrest-ng, does not sound too onerous of a requirement and clearly communicates to users that maintainers have changed (see also paperless ng/ngx as good examples of such a change).

Finding a successor is also not easy nor cheap (in regards to time).

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xnorswap 35 minutes ago
You'll also find plenty of potential malware injectors too, and who would want the responsibility of trying to vet a successor and have to work out the difference?
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moritzruth 5 minutes ago
They are not really forbidding the use of the name (unless they have registered a trademark), they probably simply want to avoid confusion.
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jeswin 34 minutes ago
There's no way to know if a new maintainer will live up to whatever standards they've kept to date. Archiving should be the default decision, unless there's formal and elaborate handover.
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dschuessler 30 minutes ago
Because you will attract people who will want to take advantage of the trust these 3.8k stars signal to some people, for example, by means of supply chain attacks.
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hombre_fatal 30 minutes ago
Because that rug pulls your users.

3.8k stars and the name is years of built up trust with you, not with the person you gave it to.

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arbll 22 minutes ago
A maintainer that is mainly motivated by the 3.8k stars aspect is probably not the person you want. Working on critical OSS software is fun until it's not, especially when you are not paid for that work.
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duskdozer 25 minutes ago
Those people can just as easily fork it and make a new name then. Otherwise you end up with situations where it's actually an entirely new thing under new developers under the same name. Even riskier in the age of the "AI clean rewrite"
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