pgBackRest — Postgres FM

Nik and Michael are joined by David Steele to talk all things pgBackRest.

Here are some links to things they mentioned:

David Steele https://postgres.fm/people/david-steele
pgBackRest https://pgbackrest.org
pg_basebackup https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-pgbasebackup.html
Barman https://pgbarman.org
pgmoneta https://github.com/pgmoneta/pgmoneta
WAL-G https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g
Return pg_control from pg_backup_stop (patch proposal) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/86436ff9-eb98-4c8a-825e-3bcae022107b%40pgbackrest.org#e36e2ad2f410d1a9a1152e36aa66bb48
Add StorageReadMulti for prefetched multi-file/range reads from object stores (pgBackRest change that needs review) https://github.com/pgbackrest/pgbackrest/pull/2783
pg_hardstorage https://github.com/cybertec-postgresql/pg_hardstorage
Why the cycle of open-source sustainability needs to be virtuous (blog post by Gabriele Bartolini) https://www.gabrielebartolini.it/articles/2026/04/why-the-cycle-of-open-source-sustainability-needs-to-be-virtuous
ARIN https://www.arin.net
Stefan Fercot https://pgstef.github.io/about
pgBackRest sponsors at the time of recording: AWS, Supabase, pgEdge, Tiger Data, Percona, Eon, Xata, Dalibo, Data Egret

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00:00 – Intro & pgBackRest origin story
03:07 – Could pgBackRest live in Postgres core? Why it hasn't happened
11:37 – Primary vs. standby backups & corruption safety
20:36 – Measuring RPO & RTO in practice
26:20 – Checksum performance & S3 storage class tips
30:02 – Standby replay bottleneck
35:12 – Log shipping, streaming replication, and sharding
44:56 – Maintenance reality & the sponsorship crisis
47:41 – What's next: repo-to-repo backup & RPO-zero streaming
56:00 – Incremental backup
1:05:01 – Reliability philosophy
1:10:05 – Second maintainer, community growth & wrap-up

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

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Postgres FM is produced by:

Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork