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2020-05-19

pgBackRest preview - Info command and backup/expire running status

pgBackRest is a well-known powerful backup and restore tool. The 2.26 version has been released on Apr 20, 2020. New features have been developed since then.

Today, let’s have a look at: add backup/expire running status to the info command.

This is implemented by checking for a backup lock on the host where info is running so there are a few limitations:

* It is not currently possible to know which command is running: backup, expire, or stanza-*. 
The stanza commands are very unlikely to be running so it's pretty safe to guess backup/expire. 
Command information may be added to the lock file to improve the accuracy of the reported command.

* If the info command is run on a host that is not participating in the backup, e.g. a standby, then there will be no backup lock. 
This seems like a minor limitation since running info on the repo or primary host is preferred.
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2020-03-18

check_pgbackrest 1.8 has been released

check_pgbackrest is designed to monitor pgBackRest backups, relying on the status information given by the info command.

The changes in this new release are:

  • missing archives output: the complete list is now only shown in --debug mode;
  • new --list-archives argument to print the list of all the archived WAL segments found.
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2020-03-02

pgBackRest auto-select backup

pgBackRest is a well-known powerful backup and restore tool.

The 2.24 version, released on February 25, introduced auto-selection of backup set on restore when time target is specified. Auto-selection is performed only when --set is not specified. If a backup set for the given target time can’t be found, the latest (default) backup set will be used.

Let’s illustrate it!

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2019-07-19

pgBackRest S3 configuration

pgBackRest is a well-known powerful backup and restore tool.

While the documentation describes all the parameters, it’s not always that simple to imagine what you can really do with it.

In this post, I will introduce some of the parameters needed to configure the access to an Amazon S3 bucket.

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2019-04-17

One RPM to rule them all...

As of 15 April 2019, there is only one repository RPM per distro, and it includes repository information for all available PostgreSQL releases.

This change, announced by Devrim on the pgsql-pkg-yum mailing list, has some impacts.

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2019-03-26

pgBackRest archiving tricks

pgBackRest is a well-known powerful backup and restore tool.

While the documentation describes all the parameters, it’s not always that simple to imagine what you can really do with it.

In this post, I will introduce the asynchronous archiving and the possibility to avoid PostgreSQL to go down in case of archiving problems.

With its “info” command, for performance reasons, pgBackRest doesn’t check that all the needed WAL segments are still present. check_pgbackrest is clearly built for that. The two tricks mentioned above can produce gaps in the archived WAL segments. The new 1.5 release of check_pgbackrest provides ways to handle that, we’ll also see how.

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2019-03-01

PostgreSQL major version upgrade impact on pgBackRest

pgBackRest is a well-known powerful backup and restore tool.

While it works with a really simple configuration, a major version upgrade of PostgreSQL has some impact on it.

Immediately after upgrading PostgreSQL to a newer major version, the pg-path for all pgBackRest configurations must be set to the new database location and the stanza-upgrade command must be run.

That command updates the stanza information to reflect the new cluster information and, for example, allows to archiving process to work.

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