Barman 2.8 released

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17 May 2019: 2ndQuadrant is proud to announce the release of Barman version 2.8, a Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL.

This minor release introduces support for incremental backup in geo-redundancy and fixes a few bugs, including performance ones.

Barman 2.8 declares official support for Python 3 and deprecates Python 2 (which might be discontinued in future releases).

This release deprecates support for PostgreSQL 9.3 and older.

Important changes and limitations for all users of the backup from standby feature have been introduced in version 2.8: PostgreSQL 9.4 or higher is required, and WAL shipping must be configured from the standby, with WAL streaming from the standby and replication slots being the recommended option (please consult the documentation for more detailed information).

Users of rsync backup method on a primary server should explicitly set backup_options to either concurrent_backup (recommended for PostgreSQL 9.6 or higher) or exclusive_backup (current default). Barman 2.8 emits a warning if no default value is set.

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

Release notes

  • Add support for reuse_backup in geo-redundancy for incremental backup copy in passive nodes

  • Improve performance of rsync based copy by using strptime instead of the more generic dateutil.parser (#210)

  • Add ‘–test’ option to barman-wal-archive and barman-wal-restore to verify the connection with the Barman server

  • Complain if backup_options is not explicitly set, as the future default value will change from exclusive_backup to concurrent_backup when PostgreSQL 9.5 will be declared EOL by the PGDG

  • Display additional settings in the show-server and diagnose commands: archive_timeout, data_checksums, hot_standby, max_wal_senders, max_replication_slots and wal_compression.

  • Merge the barman-cli project in Barman

  • Bug fixes:

    • Fix encoding error in get-wal on Python 3 (Jeff Janes, #221)
    • Fix exclude_and_protect_filter (Jeff Janes, #217)
    • Remove spurious message when resetting WAL (Jeff Janes, #215)
    • Fix sync-wals error if primary has WALs older than the first backup
    • Support for double quotes in synchronous_standby_names setting
  • Minor changes:

    • Improve messaging of check --nagios for inactive servers
    • Log remote SSH command with recover command
    • Hide logical decoding connections in replication-status command

This release officially supports Python 3 and deprecates Python 2 (which might be discontinued in future releases).

PostgreSQL 9.3 and older is deprecated from this release of Barman. Support for backup from standby is now limited to PostgreSQL 9.4 or higher and to WAL shipping from the standby (please refer to the documentation for details).

Upgrade information

Users of rsync backup method on a primary server should explicitly set backup_options to either concurrent_backup (recommended for PostgreSQL 9.6 or higher) or exclusive_backup (current default) before upgrading to Barman 2.8, otherwise Barman emits a warning every time it runs.

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