Barman 1.3.3 released

2ndQuadrant is proud to announce the release of version 1.3.3 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL.

This major release improves robustness of both backup procedures and their monitoring, by introducing:

• the so-called “smelly backup” control, allowing DBAs to detect possible problems in scheduling of periodical backups, by receiving complaints by “barman check” when the latest available backup for a server is older than a specified timeframe
• management of retry attempts for base backup copy (for both “barman backup” and “barman recover” commands), making the operation more resiliant to temporary issues such as network connection drops

Performance issues have been fixed in relation to remote recovery over existing directories (incremental recovery), by invoking checksum control only when strictly necessary.

Usability has been enhanced through better exception handling, output and logging messages. PostgreSQL 8.3 is also now supported.

The following major bugs have been fixed:

• Copies “recovery.conf” during remote barman recover (#45)
• Correctly detect pre/post archive hook scripts (#41)

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

Links

• Website: http://www.pgbarman.org/
• Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/
• Documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation/
• Support: http://www.pgbarman.org/support/
• pgespresso extension: https://github.com/2ndquadrant-it/pgespresso

Release notes

• Added “last_backup_max_age”, a new global/server option that allows administrators to set the max age of the last backup in a catalogue, making it easier to detect any issues with periodical backup execution
• Improved robustness of “barman backup” by introducing two global/server options: “basebackup_retry_times” and “basebackup_retry_sleep”. These options allow an administrator to specify, respectively, the number of attempts for a copy operation after a failure, and the number of seconds of wait before retrying
• Improved the recovery process via rsync on an existing directory (incremental recovery), by splitting the previous rsync call into several ones – invoking checksum control only when necessary
• Added support for PostgreSQL 8.3
• Minor changes:
  • Support for comma separated list values configuration options
  • Improved backup durability by calling fsync() on backup and WAL files during “barman backup” and “barman cron”
  • Improved Nagios output for “barman check –nagios”
  • Display compression ratio for WALs in “barman show-backup”
  • Correctly handled keyboard interruption (CTRL-C) while performing barman backup
  • Improved error messages of failures regarding the stop of a backup
  • Wider coverage of unit tests
• Bug fixes:
  • Copies “recovery.conf” on the remote server during barman recover (#45)
  • Correctly detect pre/post archive hook scripts (#41)

Minor bugs have also been fixed.

Many thanks for funding towards the development of this release go to Agile Business Group (www.agilebg.com), JobRapido (www.ajobrapido.com), Navionics (www.navionics.com), and Subito.it (www.subito.it).

Download

• Release Notes: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/
• Sources: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-1.3.3.tar.gz/download
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 5: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-1.3.3-1.rhel5.noarch.rpm/download (dependencies: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/rhel5-deps/)
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 6: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-1.3.3-1.rhel6.noarch.rpm/download (dependencies: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/rhel6-deps/)
• PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/barman/1.3.3
• pgespresso on PostgreSQL Extension framework (PGXN): http://pgxn.org/dist/pgespresso/
• pgespresso RPM/Debian packages: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/pgespresso/
• Online documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation
• PDF documentation: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-tutorial.en.pdf/download

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’s most requested features include backup catalogues, retention policies, remote backup and recovery, archiving and compression of WAL files and backups.

Barman is distributed under GNU GPL 3.