Re: Barman versus pgBackRest

Hi Thomas,

On 3/6/18 2:53 PM, Thomas Poty wrote:
> Hello Community,
>
> I hesitate to use barman or pgBackRest.  I have found a lot of common
> points between them and a few differences:

To be clear, I'm the original author and primary maintainer of
pgBackRest. I'll let the Barman folks speak to their strengths, but I'm
happy to address your points below.

> About pgBarman, I like :
> - be able restore on a remote server from the backup server

This a good feature, and one that has been requested for pgBackRest. You
can do this fairly trivially with ssh, however, so it generally hasn't
been a big deal for people. Is there a particular reason you need this
feature?

> - use replication slots for backingup wal on the backup server.

Another good feature. We have not added it yet because pgBackRest was
originally written for very high-volume clusters (100K+ WAL per day) and
our parallel async feature answers that need much better. We recommend
a replicated standby for more update-to-date data.

Even so, we are looking at adding support for replication slots to
pgBackRest. We are considering a hybrid scheme that will use
replication to keep the WAL archive as up to date as possible, while
doing bulk transfer with archive_command.

> About pgBackRest, I like :
>
> - real differential backup.
> - lots of options
> - option for backingup if PostgreSQL is already in backup mode
>
>
> I would like to have :
> - advices or feedbach about using pgBackrest or barman.
> - pros and cons of these solutions

I'll stick with some of the major pgBackRest pros:

- Parallel backup including compression and checksums
- Encryption
- S3 support
- Parallel archive
- Delta restore
- Page checksum validation
- Backup resume

More about features here: https://pgbackrest.org

> - differences that I would not have seen.

pgBackRest is used in some very demanding environments and we are
constantly answering the needs of our users with features and
performance improvements, e.g. the enormous improvements to archive-push
speed in the 2.0 release.

I'd be happy to answer any specific questions you have about pgBackRest.

Regards,
--
-David
david(at)pgmasters(dot)net