Development pgBackRest, a popular open-source tool for backing up and restoring PostgreSQL databases, will continue to be developed. David Steele, the project's maintainer, announced this: in recent weeks, a group of sponsors has formed around the project, ready to finance further development. This will free pgBackRest from being dependent on a single corporate sponsor, which should make the project more sustainable in the long term.
The story turned out to be illustrative. At the end of April, Steele объявил, is ceasing work on pgBackRest and archiving the repository. The reason was the inability to find sustainable funding after losing its previous corporate support. According to the developer, pgBackRest had been his main project for 13 years, but maintaining such a tool nights and weekends indefinitely is impossible.
pgBackRest is used for PostgreSQL backup, recovery, and archiving. The project is designed not only for small installations, but also for large databases and heavy production workloads. The current stable version is pgBackRest 2.58.0.
Among the new sponsors named are AWS, Supabase, pgEdge, Tiger Data, Percona and EonThe announcement emphasizes that these companies themselves rely on pgBackRest to ensure disaster recovery for their products and customers' infrastructure.
percona announced separately Percona announced its support for pgBackRest. The company stated that this support will allow David Steele to return to active work on the project, dedicating time to bug fixes, developing new features, and reviewing changes from the community. Furthermore, Percona intends to participate in the training of a new maintainer to ensure the project doesn't become tied to a single person again.
Important details:
Development will not stop.
Following the April announcement of the de facto shutdown of the project, the situation has changed: pgBackRest will continue to be developed, and the maintainer will return to work.Financing is now collective.
The project should no longer be dependent on a single company. This is crucial: the previous model had already proven its fragility when the loss of a single sponsor jeopardized the entire instrument.There are plans to expand the support team.
One of the lessons learned from the crisis is the need not only for funding but also for knowledge transfer. They plan to bring in another support person to the project to reduce the risk of a recurrence.PostgreSQL users do not need to migrate urgently.
After the repository was archived, some administrators began discussing alternatives like Barman and pgmoneta, but pgBackRest now has a clear path forward. For existing installations, this means there's no need to make emergency decisions simply out of fear of deprecation.The story has become a reminder of the price of infrastructure FOSS.
pgBackRest isn't a fancy toy, but a tool that's essential for PostgreSQL backups in production. But even such projects often rely on just one or two people, while businesses perceive them as "free infrastructure out of thin air."
Technically, pgBackRest remains the same: it supports full, differential, and incremental backups, parallel operations, local and remote repositories, integrity checking, multi-storage support, and WAL archiving. The project is licensed under the MIT license.
Source: linux.org.ru
