July 28, 2020: Crunchy Data announces the release of pgBackRest 2.28, the latest version of the reliable, easy-to-use backup and restore solution that can seamlessly scale up to the largest databases and workloads.
pgBackRest has introduced many exciting new features this year including Azure repository storage, time-based retention for full backups, ad hoc backup expiration, Zstandard/lz4/bzip2 compression, backup auto-select for time-based PITR, and a pure C implementation.
pgBackRest supports a robust set of features for managing your backup and recovery infrastructure, including: parallel backup/restore, full/differential/incremental backups, delta restore, parallel asynchronous archiving, per-file checksums, page checksums (when enabled) validated during backup, multiple compression types, encryption, partial/failed backup resume, backup from standby, tablespace and link support, S3/Azure support, backup expiration, local/remote operation via SSH, flexible configuration, and more.
You can install pgBackRest from the PostgreSQL Yum Repository or the PostgreSQL APT Repository. Source code can be downloaded from releases.
Repositories may now be located on Azure blob storage using either shared key or SAS authentication. See Documentation.
Full backups can be expired based on the age of the backup rather than the total number of backups. This prevents violating the retention period in the case where a new full backup is made outside the regular schedule. See Documentation.
Any backup may be expired even if it is still inside the retention period. This allows a custom retention scheme to be implemented or a single backup made by mistake to be removed. See Documentation.
These new compression options allow for more choices between compression speed and ratio. Note that only bzip2 is available on all supported platforms. lz4 is available on most non-EOL platforms and Zstandard on only newer platforms. See Documentation.
When restoring with the --target-time option the optimal backup will be selected automatically based on the time provided. See Documentation.
pgBackRest is now implemented in pure C99. This implementation improves performance, simplifies dependencies, and allows deep integration with PostgreSQL data structures on any architecture.