Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL

We (ParadeDB) use Barman via CloudNativePG for almost all our deployments. It's been solid, although I've had a few complaints about 1) inability to set S3 storage classes, 2) slow upload for very large databases.

Nonetheless, very happy to see this project on the front page of HN!

We use Barman inside Kubernetes via CloudNativePG's plugin, as it is the default backup plugin.

Barman has always been solid for backup and restore, however configuring backup in CNPG is a little more interesting - WAL limits need to be set carefully or you just end up filling WAL volumes and the database becoming unavailable.

Last time I checked, Barman didn't support backups to S3. That's why (for us) pgBackRest was such a big deal: it could offload full and incremental backups to a basically limitless and reliable medium.

I think (and I'm probably wrong now) that Barman only could push backups to another Linux machine (e.g., EC2 box), so you had to worry about your backup system _on top_ of the main DB.

So I'm really hoping someone will pickup maintaining pgBackRest.

A shout out to Databasus (https://databasus.com). It’s a remarkably simply utility and web interface to schedule PostgreSQL backups. I use it in my homelab and works great.

This is a fantastic project that a lot of self-hosters using PostgreSQL use. Specially with pgBackRest archived by the owner on Apr 27, 2026, this is likely the leading option that has been around the block for a while.

Anyone here had considered Barman in the past, used it for a while and went to pgBackRest? Are you revisiting that decision now?