Development pgBackRest, a popular open-source tool for backing up and restoring PostgreSQL databases, will continue. This was announced by the project maintainer David Steele: in recent weeks, a group of sponsors has formed around the project, ready to fund further development. As a result, pgBackRest will no longer rely on a single corporate sponsor, which should make the project's development more sustainable in the long term.
The story is telling. At the end of April, Steele announced, announced that he was ceasing work on pgBackRest and archiving the repository. The reason was the inability to find sustainable funding after losing previous corporate support. According to the developer, pgBackRest had been his main project for 13 years, but it is impossible to support such a tool endlessly during nights and weekends.
pgBackRest is used for backing up, restoring, and archiving PostgreSQL. The project is intended not only for small installations but also for large databases and serious production loads. The current stable version is stated as pgBackRest 2.58.0.
Among the new sponsors are AWS, Supabase, pgEdge, Tiger Data, Percona, and Eon. The announcement emphasizes that these companies rely on pgBackRest for ensuring recovery from failures in their products and customer infrastructures.
Percona separately announced its joining in funding pgBackRest. The company stated that support would allow David Steele to return to active work on the project, allocate time for fixing bugs, developing new features, and reviewing changes from the community. Additionally, Percona intends to participate in preparing a new maintainer so that the project does not become dependent on one person again.
Among the important details:
Development will not stop.
After the April announcement of the effective halt of the project, the situation has changed: pgBackRest will continue to evolve, and the maintainer is returning to work.Funding is now collective.
The project no longer needs to rely on one company. This is an important point: the previous model had already demonstrated its fragility when the loss of one sponsor threatened the entire tool.There are plans to expand the maintenance team.
One takeaway from the crisis is the necessity not only for funds but also for knowledge transfer. The project aims to involve an additional facilitator to reduce the risk of repeating the situation.PostgreSQL users do not need to rush to migrate.
After archiving the repository, some administrators began discussing alternatives like Barman and pgmoneta, but now pgBackRest has a clear development path again. For existing installations, this means that emergency decisions don't have to be made just out of fear of losing support.The story serves as a reminder of the cost of infrastructure FOSS.
pgBackRest is not a trendy toy; it's a tool that PostgreSQL backups in production depend on. However, even such projects often rely on one or two individuals while the business views them as "free infrastructure out of thin air."
Technically, pgBackRest remains the same tool: it supports full, differential, and incremental backups, parallel operation execution, local and remote repositories, integrity checks, multi-storage handling, and WAL archiving. The project is distributed under the MIT license.
Source: linux.org.ru
