Subject: Barman 3.18.0 Released
Date: 2026-03-12
From: EnterpriseDB
We are pleased to announce the release of Barman 3.18.0.
Barman (Backup and Recovery Manager) is an open-source administration tool for remote backups and disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers in business-critical environments. It relies on PostgreSQL's point-in-time recovery technology, allowing DBAs to manage a complete catalog of backups and the recovery phase of multiple remote servers from one location.
This release marks a significant step toward a unified cloud backup experience, introducing incremental backups for cloud storage and bringing cloud backup operations directly into the main Barman CLI.
Release Highlights
Incremental Backups for Cloud Storage (Experimental) Barman 3.18 introduces block-level incremental backups for cloud storage, reducing storage costs and upload times by sending only changed data blocks. Built on native PostgreSQL streaming backups via pg_basebackup, this feature streams directly to cloud storage (S3, Azure Blob, GCS) through a small configurable local staging area, with no full backup copy stored on the Barman host. Configurable via the new cloud_staging_directory and cloud_staging_max_size options. Note: restore support is not yet available in this release and will be added in a future release.
New local-to-cloud Backup Method A new backup_method = local-to-cloud option enables direct cloud backup through the main barman CLI, without the standalone barman-cloud-* scripts. This is the first step toward unifying and eventually deprecating those scripts. Cloud storage is configured directly in the Barman config using a cloud URL in basebackups_directory (e.g., s3://bucket/path).
New barman cloud-wal-archive Command Complements local-to-cloud by enabling WAL archiving directly from PostgreSQL's pg_wal directory to cloud object storage. Supports in-memory compression (gzip, bzip2, xz, snappy, zstd, lz4) before upload.
Improvements
LZ4 Compression for Cloud Backups: barman-cloud-backup now supports --lz4 compression, joining --gzip, --bzip2, and --snappy as cloud compression options.
S3 Addressing Style Control: A new --addressing-style option (auto, virtual, or path) improves compatibility with S3-compatible storage systems requiring virtual-hosted-style addressing.
Custom Restore Command: barman recover now accepts a --restore-command option to override the default WAL restore command at recovery time, without needing to manually edit PostgreSQL configuration files afterward.
Python 3.14 Compatibility: Cloud backup operations now work correctly with Python 3.14.
Bug Fixes
WAL Archiving File Handle Leak: Fixed a resource leak in cloud WAL archiving where file handles were not properly closed after upload, which could cause "Too many open files" errors on long-running archiving services.
Links
Website: https://pgbarman.org/ Download: https://www.enterprisedb.com/software-downloads-postgres#barman Documentation: https://docs.pgbarman.org/ Release Notes: https://docs.pgbarman.org/release/3.18.0/releases/index.html Support: https://pgbarman.org/support/
About Barman
Barman is distributed under the GNU GPL 3 license and maintained by EnterpriseDB (EDB).