Re: Remove Deprecated Exclusive Backup Mode

Greetings,

* Andres Freund (andres(at)anarazel(dot)de) wrote:
> On 2019-02-25 08:14:16 -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > > It will be annoying if after this removal, companies must change their
> > > backup strategy by using specific postgres tools (pgbackrest, barman).
> >
> > You don't write your own database system using CSV files and shell
> > magic, do you? I have to say that it continues to boggle my mind that
> > people insist that *this* part of the system has to be able to be
> > implementable using shell scripts.
> >
> > Folks, these are your backups we're talking about, your last resort if
> > everything else goes up in flames, why do you want to risk that by
> > implementing your own one-off solution, particularly when there's known
> > serious issues using that interface, and you want to just use shell
> > scripts to do it...?
>
> FWIW, if you weren't selling backrest quite so hard everywhere backups
> are mentioned, I'd find this thread a lot more convicing.

I push pgbackrest, just like I push PG, because I view it as the best
open source tool out there for the job, well architected, designed from
the ground-up to do what a backup tool needs to, and it has a strong
community around it with people contributing back, all openly and under
a permissive license which allows anyone to use it, hack on it, and do
what they want with it- basically, I see it as the PG of backup tools
for PG. What PG is to relational databases, pgbackrest is to PG backup
tools, imv.

As David mentioned already, this really doesn't change things for
pgbackrest one way or the other- we don't use the old API and haven't
since the non-exclusive API was available. In addition, pgbackrest
hasn't got a solution for the "we just want to take a snapshot" or "we
just want to use start/stop hooks". If I was really trying to push
people to pgbackrest because of the flaws in the exclusive backup mode,
I'd surely develop answers to those issues first and make them part of
pgbackrest in short order, and then start yelling from the tops of
buildings about how broken the exclusive backup API is and about how
I've got an easy solution for everyone to move to, maybe do a blog post
on planet. I'm not doing that though, instead I'm discussing the
issues here, with a tiny fraction of our community, and pushing for us
to agree to get rid of a dangerous API in favor of an API that anyone
can use w/o pgbackrest, if they want to.

Thanks!

Stephen