Re: clarification for pg_basebackup and major versions

Hi, Team !

Thanks for your reply !

What I see in the fields is the lack of such simple
supported/recommended/prerequisites notes/links in the official PostgreSQL
documentation (pg_backup is just an example).
That might lead to further confusion for PostgreSQL users.
As an example pls. let me share the logical replication documentation
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/logical-replication.html which says:
'
...
- Replicating between different major versions of PostgreSQL.
- Replicating between PostgreSQL instances on different platforms (for
example Linux to Windows)
...
'
I do believe something similar about pg_basebackup would be very welcome by
PostgreSQL users.

best regards,

Alexey Shishkin

[image: image.png]

*Alexey Shishkin*

Technical Account Manager

EDB Software GmbH

alexey(dot)shishkin(at)enterprisedb(dot)com

www.enterprisedb.com <https://enterprisedb.com/>

On Mon, Jan 19, 2026 at 7:23 PM David G. Johnston <
david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Monday, January 19, 2026, Alexey Shishkin <
> alexey(dot)shishkin(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> Hi, Team !
>>
>> Some more clarification about pg_basebackup which should be available in
>> the documentation:
>>
>> - if pg_basebackup works between different versions of the same OS (ex.
>> RHEL8 and RHEL9)
>> - if pg_basebackup works between different types of OS Linux (ex. RHEL10
>> and Debian13) or OS Windows (ex. Windows 2016 and Windows 2019)
>> - if pg_basebackup works between different types of OS (ex. Ubuntu 24.04
>> and Windows 2022)
>> - if pg_basebackup works between different platforms (ex. Linux on amd64
>> and Linux on arm64)
>> - if pg_basebackup works between 32-bit OS and 64-bit OS
>>
>>>
>>>
> Please don’t top-post.
>
> I agree this these dynamics aren’t readily exposed in the documentation.
> I disagree that pg_basebackup should be considered as an authoritative
> location for covering the material. It would simply link to such a
> location in notes or “see also”.
>
> In short, though, it like pretty much any client program will function
> correctly regardless of differences with the server. But a physical backup
> is only truly promised to work if the environment that is processing the
> data matches the environment that produced the data.
>
> David J.
>