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: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/
• Documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation/
• Support: http://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.

This will be the first ever PostgreSQL Users Group meeting in Melbourne. They will have 3 speakers across the entire day on a wide range of topics. The event will take place in Melbourne, Victoria on February 4, 2013.

Gabriele Bartolini, Barman core team,  will presents PostgreSQL Disaster Recovery with Barman, a special talk to explain how Barman will help every database administrator to manage complex database architectures.

More information on www.pgday.org.au

This minor release includes:

• Support for the “configuration_files_directory” option that allows to include multiple server configuration files from a directory
• Support for special backup IDs: latest, last, oldest, first
• Management of multiple servers to the ‘list-backup’ command: ‘barman list-backup all’ now list backups for all the configured servers.
• Support for “application_name” management for PostgreSQL >= 9.0
• Fix of bug #18: ignore missing WAL files if not found during delete

Download and general information

You can find more information on Barman at www.pgbarman.org.

Download:

• Sources
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 5 (dependencies)
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 6 (dependencies)
• PyPI
• Documentation

About Barman

Barman (acronym for Backup And Recovery MANager)
is an open source administration tool for disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers written
in Python for Linux systems. It allows remote backups of multiple Postgres servers in
business critical environments and helps database administrators during the recovery phase.

Barman’s most wanted features include backup catalogues, retention policies,
remote recovery, archiving and compression of WAL files and backups.
Built on top of PostgreSQL’s robust and reliable Point-In-Time-Recovery technology,
Barman allows database administrators to manage the backup and recovery phases
of several PostgreSQL database servers from a centralised location, using an
intuitive command interface.

Barman is distributed under GNU GPL 3.

With Barman you can use the backup host as a simple backup server, and simply store backup data regarding different PostgreSQL version servers. Or plan to use it for recovery as well (local recovery). In this case you need to install every PostgreSQL version for which you need to perform local recovery.

In these first 5 months of Barman’s life, we have received a few requests from users (mainly system administrators) around the world asking to simplify the management of backups for several databases. My personal opinion is that this use case is typical of hosting companies or big organisations.

The upcoming 1.1.2 release of Barman will include the so called configuration files directory setting, which allows system administrators and DBAs to specify a directory that will contain server directives. For example, you can define in Barman’s global configuration section the following option:

configuration_files_directory = /etc/barman.d

This option will make Barman look for *.conf files in that directory and evaluate them on the fly. Suppose you have to manage the backup of 6 or more PostgreSQL instances, you can specify a different file for each of those instances and name it in a meaningful way:

|- /etc
  |- barman.d
    |- 01-angus.conf
    |- 02-malcolm.conf
    |- 03-bon.conf.disabled
    |- 04-brian.conf
    |- 05-phil.conf
    |- 06-chris.conf
    |- ...

Then specify a server configuration in /etc/barman.d/01-angus.conf:

[angus]
description = Angus Rocks
ssh_command = ssh angus
conninfo = host=angus port=5432 user=postgres dbname=postgres

Adding a new server or disabling/removing a server becomes as trivial as adding a new file or renaming it.

If you type “barman list-server” you get:

angus - Angus Rocks
brian - Brian screams
chris - Chris on the bass
...

This behaviour is quite spread on Linux applications and allows to improve the integration of Barman with configuration managers such as Puppet.

More information on this feature is available in the online documentation of Barman, in the basic configuration section.

Another interesting feature added in version 1.1.2 is the shortcut ID for backups. Barman now manages shortcut aliases for backup identifiers such as latest/last or oldest/first.

This means that you can now type “barman delete SERVER_ID oldest” and easily delete the oldest backup available for that server, or type “barman show-backup SERVER_ID latest” to get information about the latest backup available for that server. Cool, isn’t it?

So, stay tuned for version 1.1.2! Ciao!

Now, you can simply add the below PPA to get the latest version of Barman in your Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

This quick tutorial will show you how to add Barman Official PPA in Ubuntu 12.04.

Objectives:

• Add Barman Official PPA in Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin)
• Install the latest version of Barman
• Enjoy!

To get started, run the commands below to add the PPA (Personal Package Archive) to your software sources. If you miss the add-apt-repository command please install the python-software-properties package

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mnencia/barman

Next, run the commands below to update your package indexes.

sudo apt-get update

Finally, run the commands below to install Barman.

sudo apt-get install barman

Barman is installed in your system.

To configure and run it you can now follow the Official Barman Tutorial

That’s all!

This minor version fixes a small bug with the “barman recover” command, introduced with version 1.1.0.

Barman users are encouraged to update their systems to this version, which can be downloaded from Sourceforge.net.

This release includes:

• Support for hook scripts to be executed before and after a ‘backup’ command through the ‘pre_backup_script’ and ‘post_backup_script’ configuration options.
• Management of multiple servers to the ‘backup’ command. ‘barman backup all’ now iteratively backs up all the configured servers.
• Fixed bug #9: “9.2 issue with pg_tablespace_location()”
• Add warning in recovery when file location options have been defined in the postgresql.conf file (issue #10)
• Fail fast on recover command if the destination directory contains the ‘:’ character (Closes: #4) or if an invalid tablespace relocation rule is passed
• Report an informative message when pg_start_backup() invocation fails because an exclusive backup is already running (Closes: #8)

This major release is an important milestone in the lifecycle of the project, and includes:

• Backup of multiple PostgreSQL servers, with different versions. Versions from PostgreSQL 8.4 and above are supported
• Support for secure remote backup (through SSH)
• Management of a catalog of backups for every server, allowing users to easily create new backups, delete old ones or restore them
• Compression of WAL files that can be configured on a per server basis using compression/decompression filters, both predefined (gzip and bzip2) or custom
• Support for INI configuration file with global and per-server directives. Default location for configuration files are /etc/barman.conf or ~/.barman.conf. The ‘-c’ option allows users to specify a different one
• Simple indexing of base backups and WAL segments that does not require a local database
• Maintenance mode (invoked through the ‘cron’ command) which performs ordinary operations such as WAL archival and compression, catalog updates, etc.
• Added the ‘backup’ command which takes a full physical base backup of the given PostgreSQL server configured in Barman
• Added the ‘recover’ command which performs local recovery of a given backup, allowing DBAs to specify a point in time. The ‘recover’ command supports relocation of both the PGDATA directory and, where applicable, the tablespaces
• Added the ‘–remote-ssh-command’ option to the ‘recover’ command for remote recovery of a backup. Remote recovery does not currently support relocation of tablespaces
• Added the ‘list-server’ command that lists all the active servers that have been configured in barman
• Added the ‘show-server’ command that shows the relevant information for a given server, including all configuration options
• Added the ‘status’ command which shows information about the current state of a server, including Postgres version, current transaction ID, archive command, etc.
• Added the ‘check’ command which returns 0 if everything Barman needs is functioning correctly
• Added the ‘list-backup’ command that lists all the available backups for a given server, including size of the base backup and total size of the related WAL segments
• Added the ‘show-backup’ command that shows the relevant information for a given backup, including time of start, size, number of related WAL segments and their size, etc.
• Added the ‘delete’ command which removes a backup from the catalog
• Added the ‘list-files’ command which lists all the files for a single backup
• RPM Package for RHEL 5/6

Barman: disaster recovery for business critical PostgreSQL databases