Barman 2.6 released

4 February 2019: 2ndQuadrant is proud to announce the release of Barman version 2.6, a Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL.

This major release introduces geographical redundancy to Barman, which allows DBAs and System Administrators to add another tier to their disaster recovery solution for PostgreSQL databases. You can now add a remote Barman installation to your infrastructure that copies, in an asynchronous way, the content of another Barman. Alternatively, if you prefer, you can create hybrid installations, where a Barman installation is at the same time backing up local PostgreSQL databases and copying the content of a server backed up in another Barman server, preferably in a different availability zone. This feature relies on the primary_ssh_command configuration option (global/server) to specify the SSH connection to the origin Barman server.

Another important feature that has been added is the put-wal command, which is the remote end invoked by the barman-wal-archive script, part of the barman-cli package. barman-wal-archive is now the recommended way to ship WAL files to Barman via PostgreSQL’s archive_command, as it makes sure that WAL file content is correctly flushed to disk (a limitation of common rsync setups).

IMPORTANT: We suggest all Barman users that rely on standard WAL archiving through archive_command, to start using barman-wal-archive from now on for log shipping, instead of plain rsync.

Minor bugs have also been fixed.

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

Links

• Website
• Download
• Documentation
• Man page, section 1
• Man page, section 5
• Support
• Client utilities for Barman
• pgespresso extension

Release notes

• Add support for Geographical redundancy, introducing 3 new commands: sync-info, sync-backup and sync-wals. Geo-redundancy allows a Barman server to use another Barman server as data source instead of a PostgreSQL server.

• Add put-wal command that allows Barman to safely receive WAL files via PostgreSQL’s archive_command using the barman-wal-archive script included in barman-cli

• Add ANSI colour support to check command

• Minor fixes:

  • Fix switch-wal on standby with an empty WAL directory
  • Honour archiver locking in wait_for_wal method
  • Fix WAL compression detection algorithm
  • Fix current_action in concurrent stop backup errors
  • Do not treat lock file busy as an error when validating a backup

Download

• Release Notes
• Sources
• RPM repositories
• Deb repositories
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 6 (dependencies)
• RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 7 (dependencies)
• PyPI
• pgespresso on PostgreSQL Extension framework (PGXN)
• pgespresso RPM/Debian packages
• barman-cli RPM/Debian packages
• Online documentation
• PDF documentation