Barman 1.2.0 released

2ndQuadrant is proud to announce the release of version 1.2.0 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL. This major release introduces automated support for retention policies based on redundancy of periodical backups or recovery window.

Retention policies are integrated by a safety mechanism that allows administrators to specify a minimum number of periodical backups that must exist at any time for a server.

For a complete list of changes, see the “Release Notes” section below.

Backup retention policies

A backup retention policy is an user-defined policy that determines how long backups and related archive logs (Write Ahead Log segments in PostgreSQL) need to be retained for recovery procedures. Through the ‘retention_policy’ configuration option, Barman retains the periodical backups required to satisfy the current retention policy, and any archived WAL files required for the complete recovery of those backups. Barman users can define a retention policy in terms of backup redundancy (how many periodical backups, e.g. 5) or a recovery window (how long, e.g. 3 months).

Minimum redundancy safety

Through the ‘minimum_redundancy’ configuration option, Barman controls the minimum number of backups available at any time in the catalogue for a specific server. This feature will protect users from accidental delete operations.

Links:

• Website: http://www.pgbarman.org/
• Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/
• Documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation/
• Support: https://www.pgbarman.org/support/

Sponsors:

The open-source development of retention policies under GPL has been sponsored by a large European company that opted to remain anonymous.

Release Notes:

• Added the “retention_policy_mode” global/server option which defines the method for enforcing retention policies (currently only “auto”)
• Added the “minimum_redundancy” global/server option which defines the minimum number of backups to be kept for a server
• Added the “retention_policy” global/server option which defines retention policies management based on redunancy (e.g. REDUNDANCY 4) or recovery window (e.g. RECOVERY WINDOW OF 3 MONTHS)
• Added retention policy support to the logging infrastructure, the “check” and the “status” commands
• The “check” command now integrates minimum redundancy control
• Added retention policy states (valid, obsolete and potentially obsolete) to “show-backup” and “list-backup” commands
• The ‘all’ keyword is now forbidden as server name
• Added basic support for Nagios plugin output to the ‘check’ command through the –nagios option
• Barman now requires argh => 0.21.2 and argcomplete
• Minor bug fixes

About Barman

Barman (Backup and Recovery Manager) is an open-source administration tool for disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers written in Python. It allows your organisation to perform remote backups of multiple servers in business critical environments and help DBAs during the recovery phase. Barman most wanted features include backup catalogues, retention policies, remote recovery, archiving and compression of WAL files and backups.