Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL

by nateb2022 • 3 months ago

186 27 3 months ago

subhobroto3• 3 months ago

This 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?

hans_castorp• 3 months ago

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...

tee-es-gee• 3 months ago

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.

zigzag312• 3 months ago

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).

ninjaoxygen2• 3 months ago

We 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.

subhobroto3• 3 months ago

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.

Tostino2• 3 months ago

I thought that link was actually going to have a discussion on why they chose it. No such discussion exists.

Synthetic7346• 3 months ago

Can the plugin do non objectstore backups? E.g. If I don't want to use S3 / minio / whatever blobstore for my homelab

mkroman• 3 months ago

The plugin is specifically for handling backups via object storage.

CloudNativePG also implements support for volume snapshots: https://cloudnative-pg.io/docs/1.29/backup#backup-methods

levkk• 3 months ago

Last 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.

hephaes7us2• 3 months ago

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...

the_angry_angel• 3 months ago

There’s support via Barman cloud - we use it for azure at work but s3 and others are supported iirc

Eikon• 3 months ago

https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS Should do a great job at this.

timacles• 3 months ago

Mounting S3 with Fuse is not stable or performant enough at scale for backup storage

somewhatrandom9• 3 months ago

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...

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/features/files/

hakube• 3 months ago

They have a plugin that supports backups to cloud storage

https://docs.pgbarman.org/release/3.12.0/user_guide/barman_c...

For CNPG: https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/plugin-barman-cloud

bakies• 3 months ago

Huh... Opposite experience. Barman cloud (s3 backups) is the only way I've ever used it. I didn't realize it wasn't the only way. Makes sense it could just use a filesystem.

https://docs.pgbarman.org/release/3.14.1/user_guide/barman_c...

nodesocket• 3 months ago

A shout out to Databasus (https://databasus.com). It’s a remarkably simply utility and web interface to schedule PostgreSQL backups. I use it in my homelab and works great.

cpursley• 3 months ago

Upvote, this is working well for us.

blazarquasar• 3 months ago

Its fine for HomeLab use, but its not really an alternative to something like barman. Quite heavy and vibe-coded.

philippemnoel• 3 months ago

We (ParadeDB) use Barman via CloudNativePG for almost all our deployments. It's been solid, although I've had a few complaints about 1) inability to set S3 storage classes, 2) slow upload for very large databases.

Nonetheless, very happy to see this project on the front page of HN!

vivzkestrel• 3 months ago

- how to use barman with aws RDS

Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL

Related Stories