Barman 3.11.0 released

22 August 2024: EnterpriseDB is proud to announce the release of Barman version 3.11.0, a Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL.

Links

• Website
• Github
• Documentation
• Documentation pdf
• Man page, section 1
• Man page, section 5
• Support

Release Notes

• Add support for Postgres 17+ incremental backups. This major feature is composed of several small changes:

• Add --incremental command-line option to barman backup command. This is used to specify the parent backup when taking an incremental backup. The parent can be either a full backup or another incremental backup.

• Add latest-full shortcut backup ID. Along with latest, this can be used as a shortcut to select the parent backup for an incremental backup. While latest takes the latest backup independently if it is full or incremental, latest-full takes the latest full backup.

• barman keep command can only be applied to full backups when backup_method = postgres. If a full backup has incremental backups that depend on it, all of the incrementals are also kept by Barman.

• When deleting a backup all the incremental backups depending on it, if any, are also removed.

• Retention policies do not take incremental backups into consideration. As incremental backups cannot be recovered without having the complete chain of backups available up to the full backup, only full backups account for retention policies.

• barman recover needs to combine the full backup with the chain of incremental backups when recovering. The new CLI option --local-staging-path, and the corresponding local_staging_path configuration option, are used to specify the path in the Barman host where the backups will be combined when recovering an incremental backup.

• Changes to barman show-backup output:

• Add the “Estimated cluster size” field. It’s useful to have an estimation of the data directory size of a cluster when restoring a backup. It’s particularly useful when recovering compressed backups or incremental backups, situations where the size of the backup doesn’t reflect the size of the data directory in Postgres. In JSON format, this is stored as cluster_size.

• Add the “WAL summarizer” field. This field shows if summarize_wal was enabled in Postgres at the time the backup was taken. In JSON format, this is stored as server_information.summarize_wal. This field is omitted for Postgres 16 and older.

• Add “Data checksums” field. This shows if data_checkums was enabled in Postgres at the time the backup was taken. In JSON format, this is stored as server_information.data_checksums.

• Add the “Backup method” field. This shows the backup method used for this backup. In JSON format, this is stored as base_backup_information.backup_method.

• Rename the field “Disk Usage” as “Backup Size”. The latter provides a more comprehensive name which represents the size of the backup in the Barman host. The JSON field under base_backup_information was also renamed from disk_usage to backup_size.

• Add the “WAL size” field. This shows the size of the WALs required by the backup. In JSON format, this is stored as base_backup_information.wal_size.

• Refactor the field “Incremental size”. It is now named “Resources saving” and it now shows an estimation of resources saved when taking incremental backups with rsync or pg_basebackup. It compares the backup size with the estimated cluster size to estimate the amount of disk and network resources that were saved by taking an incremental backup. In JSON format, the field was renamed from incremental_size to resource_savings under base_backup_information.

• Add the system_id field to the JSON document. This field contains the system identifier of Postgres. It was present in console format, but was missing in JSON format.

• Add fields related with Postgres incremental backups:

• “Backup type”: indicates if the Postgres backup is full or incremental. In JSON format, this is stored as backup_type under base_backup_information.

• “Root backup”: the ID of the full backup that is the root of a chain of one or more incremental backups. In JSON format, this is stored as catalog_information.root_backup_id.

• “Parent backup”: the ID of the full or incremental backup from which this incremental backup was taken. In JSON format, this is stored as catalog_information.parent_backup_id.

• “Children Backup(s)”: the IDs of the incremental backups that were taken with this backup as the parent. In JSON format, this is stored as catalog_information.children_backup_ids.

• “Backup chain size”: the number of backups in the chain from this incremental backup up to the root backup. In JSON format, this is stored as catalog_information.chain_size.

• Changes to barman list-backup output:

• It now includes the backup type in the JSON output, which can be either rsync for backups taken with rsync, full or incremental for backups taken with pg_basebackup, or snapshot for cloud snapshots. When printing to the console the backup type is represented by the corresponding labels R, F, I or S.

• Remove tablespaces information from the output. That was bloating the output. Tablespaces information can still be found in the output of barman show-backup.

• Always set a timestamp with a time zone when configuring recovery_target_time through barman recover. Previously, if no time zone was explicitly set through --target-time, Barman would configure recovery_target_time without a time zone in Postgres. Without a time zone, Postgres would assume whatever is configured through timezone GUC in Postgres. From now on Barman will issue a warning and configure recovery_target_time with the time zone of the Barman host if no time zone is set by the user through --target-time option.

• When recovering a backup with the “no get wal” approach and --target-lsn is set, copy only the WAL files required to reach the configured target. Previously Barman would copy all the WAL files from its archive to Postgres.

• When recovering a backup with the “no get wal” approach and --target-immediate is set, copy only the WAL files required to reach the consistent point. Previously Barman would copy all the WAL files from its archive to Postgres.

• barman-wal-restore now moves WALs from the spool directory to pg_wal instead of copying them. This can improve performance if the spool directory and the pg_wal directory are in the same partition.

• barman check-backup now shows the reason why a backup was marked as FAILED in the output and logs. Previously for a user to know why the backup was marked as FAILED, they would need to run barman show-backup command.

• Add configuration option aws_await_snapshots_timeout and the corresponding --aws-await-snapshots-timeout command-line option on barman-cloud-backup. This specifies the timeout in seconds to wait for snapshot backups to reach the completed state.

• Add a keep-alive mechanism to rsync-based backups. Previously the Postgres session created by Barman to run pg_backup_start() and pg_backup_stop() would stay idle for as long as the base backup copy would take. That could lead to a firewall or router dropping the connection because it was idle for a long time. The keep-alive mechanism sends heartbeat queries to Postgres through that connection, thus reducing the likelihood of a connection getting dropped. The interval between heartbeats can be controlled through the new configuration option keepalive_interval and the corresponding CLI option --keepalive-interval of the barman backup command.

• Bug fixes:

  • When recovering a backup with the “no get wal” approach and --target-time set, copy all WAL files. Previously Barman would attempt to “guess” the WAL files required by Postgres to reach the configured target time. However, the mechanism was not robust enough as it was based on the stats of the WAL file in the Barman host (more specifically the creation time). For example: if there were archiving or streaming lag between Postgres and Barman, that could be enough for recovery to fail because Barman would miss to copy all the required WAL files due to the weak check based on file stats.

  • Pin python-snappy to 0.6.1 when running Barman through Python 3.6 or older. Newer versions of python-snappy require cramjam version 2.7.0 or newer, and these are only available for Python 3.7 or newer.

  • barman receive-wal now exits with code 1 instead of 0 in the following cases:

  • Being unable to run with --reset flag because pg_receivewal is running.

  • Being unable to start pg_receivewal process because it is already running.

  • Fix and improve information about Python in barman diagnose output:

  • The command now makes sure to use the same Python interpreter under which Barman is installed when outputting the Python version through python_ver JSON key. Previously, if an environment had multiple Python installations and/or virtual environments, the output could eventually be misleading, as it could be fetched from a different Python interpreter.

  • Added a python_executable key to the JSON output. That contains the path to the exact Python interpreter being used by Barman.

Download

Source code and wheel file can be downloaded from release 3.11.0 page.

• RPM repositories
• Deb repositories
• PyPI
• PDF documentation

About Barman

Barman is an open-source administration tool for backup and disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers written in Python. It allows organizations to perform remote backups of multiple servers in business critical environments and help DBAs during the recovery phase.

Barman is maintained by EnterpriseDB and distributed under GPL v3.