

Barman backup and recovery manager for PostgreSQL - pie
http://www.pgbarman.org/

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mitchellh
I've never used Barman and would love to hear more from people who have used
it.

I've used WAL-E[1] in production for almost a year now. It was painless to
setup and configure and has been working flawlessly for the entire time. I've
had to do database recoveries, point-in-time recoveries, and database
upgrades, and WAL-E has worked through all of them.

[1]: <https://github.com/heroku/WAL-E>

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pie
While looking beyond a pg_dump-style approach to backup/recovery, I was
considering <https://github.com/heroku/WAL-E> and discovered Barman. It's also
open source, and looks like a strong contender.

------
sheff
Another option which I've been looking at is pg_rman (
<http://code.google.com/p/pg-rman/> ) .

It's several years old, from NTT, and with a BSD license. It seems a bit
simpler , and lists a couple of useful features such as compression and backup
maintenance which don't seem to be in barman yet.

Also, from looking at the barman FAQ : "We are currently seeking sponsors
willing to fund the addition of this feature to the open-source version." is
something it would be nice to get clarification on, in case some features in
the future only go into a closed version.

~~~
gbartolini
As core team member of Barman (and manager), I want to start answering from
the bottom of your request. I actually thank you for giving me the chance to
answer to this question and to talk about Barman in general.

2ndQuadrant has adopted the open-source business model, and we have a long
history of contributions to the PostgreSQL project and its evolution (I
encourage you to verify my words). This applies to satellite projects too,
including repmgr (High Availability) and Barman (Disaster Recovery). With
Barman we have a precise statement: it has to be open-source and to remain
open-source, under GNU GPL 3. Being a business, we need to fund the
development of features through our consulting services in Disaster Recovery
or through feature sponsorships. But our intention is that everything will be
released open-source (otherwise, why bother releasing this software in the
first place?).

On a more technical point of view, one of the main characteristics of Barman
is that it does not require to be physically located where the Postgres server
resides. It performs remote backup (if you can, you can do local backups too,
but I prefer sharing nothing between a backup server and a production server -
points of view?). If you think about it carefully, this also gives more
flexibility in terms of architecture, especially in large master-slave
scenarios (you do not need to install Barman on every Postgres server or share
the same file system, for instance).

Barman can compress transactions/WAL files (bzip2, gzip or custom) and has a
parallel management of the WAL archive and periodical backups (I suggest you
read this article where we describe the association between a WAL segment and
a backup <http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/management-wal-archive-barman/>).

Currently it does not automatically compress periodical backups, but gives a
clear and simple interface to archiving (to give you an idea, we have a
customer that regularly - every week - transfers on tapes a 6TB database with
Barman). Current development version has already hooks for pre and post backup
operations. Next boundaries will be incremental backup and retention policies
(what you probably call backup maintenance) - as I said, depending on fundings
we receive.

Another important aspect of Barman is that you can have a backup server
managing multiple PostgreSQL servers, from one single place, and having a
catalogue of periodical backups.

Then ... I'd say remote recovery, data directory and tablespace relocation
during recovery, Point in Time recovery, diagnostics, etc.

If you have more information, you can join the IRC channel too or the mailing
list (details on www.pgbarman.org).

~~~
sheff
Thanks for the update on the licensing.

Barman does have a lot of great features, and hopefully I will be able to try
it out on a test system sometime soon.

