Re: Barman versus pgBackRest

On Thu, 17 Jan 2019 13:09:18 +0200
Achilleas Mantzios <achill(at)matrix(dot)gatewaynet(dot)com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> One strong point of barman IMHO is transparently converting an incremental
> backup to a full backup for retention purposes, so retention specification is
> far more liberal than with pgbackrest, and configuring for incremental backup
> does not pose any limitations to the schedule of backups. In our environment
> our net connection to the remote site (repo) is extremely lousy, (although
> within Switzerland if that makes any difference), so with pgbackrest a full
> backup of our 1.3TB db, would take about 2 days ,lets say set in cron weekly
> on sunday, (Sunday 1:00->Tuesday),  then I would have to take incr backups
> from Wednesday->Saturday. And we would have to also take a full backup next
> Sunday. With pgbarman we had to set : reuse_backup = link retention_policy =
> RECOVERY WINDOW OF 14 DAYS and just perform regular backups. So for barman
> every backup can be used as a base for the next backup, which achieves fast
> backups and reduced disk space. In pgbackrest one has to be explicit about
> the retention of both full backups and diff backups. it would be nice in
> pgbackrest to only have incremental backups and let the system do the
> necessary management (converting incremental to full) transparently and
> asynchronously, e.g.via cron. I have read about the --repo-hardlink option. "
> This gives the appearance that each backup is a full backup at the
> file-system level " So could we just take a first full backup and then switch
> permanently to incr backups?

Funnily enough, I opened an issue a month ago about this feature. If you want
to join the brainstorming, discuss, add some opinions and thoughts, see
https://github.com/pgbackrest/pgbackrest/issues/644