introduction to pgBackRest
Remark: This post has been updated on 2019-07-19, with pgBackRest 2.15
pgBackRest (http://pgbackrest.org/) aims to be a simple, reliable backup and restore system that can seamlessly scale up to the largest databases and workloads.
Instead of relying on traditional backup tools like tar and rsync, pgBackRest implements all backup features internally and uses a custom protocol to communicate with remote systems. Removing reliance on tar and rsync allows better solutions to database-specific backup challenges. The custom remote protocol also allows more flexibility and limits the types of connections that are required to perform a backup which increases security.