RELNOTES.md

Barman release notes

© Copyright EnterpriseDB UK Limited 2024 - All rights reserved.

3.12.0 (2024-11-21)

Minor changes

• Add FIPS support to Barman

  The md5 hash algorithm is not FIPS compliant, so it is going to be replaced by sha256. sha256 is FIPS compliant, vastly used, and is considered secure for most practical purposes. Up until this release, Barman's WAL archive client used hashlib.md5 to generate checksums for tar files before they were sent to the Barman server. Here, a tar file is a file format used for bundling multiple files together with a MD5SUMS file that lists the checksums and their corresponding paths. In this release, the md5 hashing algorithm is replaced by sha256 as the default. As a result, checksums for the tar files will be calculated using sha256, and the MD5SUMS file will be named SHA256SUMS. Barman still has the ability to use the nondefault md5 algorithm and the MD5SUMS file from the client if there is a use case for it. The user just needs to add the --md5 flag to the barman-wal-archive archive_command.

  References: BAR-155, CP-34954, CP-34391.

• Removed el7, debian10, and ubuntu1804 support; updated Debian and SLES.

  Support for el7, debian10, and ubuntu1804 has been removed. Additionally, version 12 and version name "bookworm" has been added for Debian, addressing a previously missing entry. The SLES image version has also been updated from sp4 to sp5.

  References: BAR-389.

• Add support for Postgres Extended 17 (PGE) and Postgres Advanced Server 17 (EPAS)

  Tests were conducted on Postgres Extended 17 (PGE) and Postgres Advanced Server 17 (EPAS), confirming full compatibility with the latest features in Barman. This validation ensures that users of the latest version of PGE and EPAS can leverage all the new capabilities of Barman with confidence.

  References: BAR-331.

• Improve WAL compression with zstd, lz4 and xz algorithms

  Introduced support for xz compression on WAL files. It can be enabled by specifying xz in the compression server parameter. WALs will be compressed when entering the Barman's WAL archive. For the cloud, it can be enabled by specifying --xz when running barman-cloud-wal-archive.

  Introduced support for zstandard compression on WAL files. It can be enabled by specifying zstd in the compression server parameter. WALs will be compressed when entering the Barman's WAL archive. For the cloud, it can be enabled by specifying --zstd when running barman-cloud-wal-archive.

  Introduced support for lz4 compression on WAL files. It can be enabled by specifying lz4 in the compression server parameter. WALs will be compressed when entering the Barman's WAL archive. For the cloud, it can be enabled by specifying --lz4 when running barman-cloud-wal-archive.

  References: BAR-265, BAR-423, BAR-264.

• Improve WAL upload performance on S3 buckets by avoiding multipart uploads

  Previously, WAL files were being uploaded to S3 buckets using multipart uploads provided by the boto3 library via the upload_fileobj method. It was noticed that multipart upload is slower when used for small files, such as WAL segments, compared to when uploading it in a single PUT request. This has been improved by avoiding multipart uploads for files smaller than 100MB. The average upload time of each WAL file is expected to be reduced by around 15% with this change.

  References: BAR-374.

• Modify behavior when enforcing retention policy for KEEP:STANDALONE full backups

  When enforcing the retention policy on full backups created with backup_method = postgres, Barman was previously marking all dependent (child) incremental backups as VALID, regardless of the KEEP target used. However, this approach is incorrect:

  • For backups labeled KEEP:STANDALONE, Barman only retains the WAL files needed to restore the server to the exact state of that backup. Because these backups are self-contained, any dependent child backups are no longer needed once the root backup is outside the retention policy.

  • In contrast, backups marked KEEP:FULL are intended for point-in-time recovery. To support this, Barman retains all WALs, as well as any child backups, to ensure the backup's consistency and allow recovery to the latest possible point.

  This distinction ensures that KEEP:STANDALONE backups serve as snapshots of a specific moment, while KEEP:FULL backups retain everything needed for full point-in-time recovery.

  References: BAR-366.

• Update documentation and user-facing features for Barman's recovery process.

  Barman docs and the tool itself used to use the terms "recover"/"recovery" both for referencing:

  • The Postgres recovery process;
  • The process of restoring a backup and preparing it for recovery.

  Both the code and documentation have been revised to accurately reflect the usage of the terms "restore" and "recover"/"recovery".

  Also, the barman recover command was renamed to barman restore. The old name is still kept as an alias for backward compatibility.

  References: BAR-337.

• Add --keep-compression flag to barman-wal-restore and get-wal

  A new --keep-compression option has been added to both barman-wal-restore and get-wal. This option controls whether compressed WAL files should be decompressed on the Barman server before being fetched. When specified with get-wal, default decompression is skipped, and the output is the WAL file content in its original state. When specified with barman-wal-restore, the WAL file is fetched as-is and, if compressed, decompressed on the client side.

  References: BAR-435.

• Ransomware protection - Add AWS Snapshot Lock Support

  Barman now supports AWS EBS Snapshot Lock, a new integrated feature to prevent accidental or malicious deletions of Amazon EBS snapshots. When a snapshot is locked, it can't be deleted by any user but remains fully accessible for use. This feature enables you to store snapshots in WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) format for a specified duration, helping to meet regulatory requirements by keeping the data secure and tamper-proof until the lock expires.

  Special thanks to Rui Marinho, our community contributor who started this feature.

  References: BAR-242.

• Prevent orphan files from being left from a crash while deleting a backup

  This commit fixes an issue where backups could leave behind files if the system crashed during the deletion of a backup.

  Now, when a backup is deleted, it will get a "delete marker" at the start. If a crash happens while the backup is being deleted, the marker will help recognize incomplete backup removals when the server restarts.

  The Barman cron job has been updated to look for these deleted markers. If it finds a backup with a "delete marker", it will complete the process.

  References: BAR-244.

• Add support for using tags with snapshots

  Barman now supports tagging the snapshots when creating backups using the barman-cloud-backup script command. A new argument called --tags was added.

  Special thanks to Rui Marinho, our community contributor who started this feature.

  References: BAR-417.

Bugfixes

• Fix barman check which returns wrong results for Replication Slot

  Previously, when using architectures which backup from a standby node and stream WALs from the primary, Barman would incorrectly use conninfo (pointing to a standby server) for replication checks, leading to errors such as:

  replication slot (WAL streaming): FAILED (replication slot 'barman' doesn't exist. Please execute 'barman receive-wal --create-slot pg17')

  This fixes the following issue #1024 by ensuring wal_conninfo is used for WAL replication checks if it's set.

  wal_conninfo takes precedence over wal_streaming_conninfo, when both are set. With this change, if only wal_conninfo is set, it will be used and will not fall back to conninfo.

  Also, in the documentation, changes were made so it is explicit that when conninfo points to a standby server, wal_conninfo must be set and used for accurate replication status checks.

  References: BAR-409.

• Fix missing options for barman keep

  The error message that the Barman CLI emitted when running barman keep without any options suggested there were shortcut aliases for status and release. These aliases, -s and -r, do not exist, so the error message was misleading. This fixes the issue by including these short options in the Barman CLI, aligning it with other tools like barman-cloud-backup-keep, where these shortcuts already exist.

  References: BAR-356.

• Lighten standby checks related to conninfo and primary_conninfo

  When backing up a standby server, Barman performs some checks to assert that conninfo is really pointing to a standby (in recovery mode) and that primary_conninfo is pointing to a primary (not in recovery).

  The problem, as reported in the issues #704 and #744, is that when a failover occurs, the conninfo will now be pointing to a primary instead and the checks will start failing, requiring the user to change Barman configs manually whenever a failover occurs.

  This fix solved the issue by making such checks non-critical, which means they will still fail but Barman will keep operating regardless. Essentially, Barman will ignore primary_conninfo if conninfo does not point to a standby. Warnings about this misconfiguration will also be emitted whenever running any Barman command so the user can be aware.

  References: BAR-348.

3.11.1 (2024-08-22)

Bugfixes

• Fix failures in barman-cloud-backup-delete. This command was failing when applying retention policies due to a bug introduced by the previous release.

3.11.0 (2024-08-22)

Notable changes

• 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.

  • 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. If a full backup has dependent incremental backups and the retention policy is applied, the full backup will propagate its status to the associated incremental backups. When the full backup is flagged with any KEEP target, Barman will set the status of all related incremental backups to VALID.

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

  • 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.

Bugfixes

• 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.

3.10.1 (2024-06-12)

Bugfixes

• Make argcomplete optional to avoid installation issues on some platforms.
• Load barman.auto.conf only when the file exists.
• Emit a warning when the cfg_changes.queue file is malformed.
• Correct in documentation the postgresql version where pg_checkpoint is available.
• Add --no-partial option to barman-cloud-wal-restore.

3.10.0 (2024-01-24)

Notable changes

• Limit the average bandwidth used by barman-cloud-backup when backing up to either AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage according to the value set by a new CLI option --max-bandwidth.

• Add the new configuration option lock_directory_cleanup That enables cron to automatically clean up the barman_lock_directory from unused lock files.

• Add support for a new type of configuration called model. The model acts as a set of overrides for configuration options for a given Barman server.

• Add a new barman command barman config-update that allows the creation and the update of configurations using JSON

Bugfixes

• Fix a bug that caused --min-chunk-size to be ignored when using barman-cloud-backup as hook script in Barman.

3.9.0 (2023-10-03)

Notable changes

• Allow barman switch-wal --force to be run against PG>=14 if the user has the pg_checkpoint role (thanks to toydarian for this patch).

• Log the current check at info level when a check timeout occurs.

• The minimum size of an upload chunk when using barman-cloud-backup with either S3 or Azure Blob Storage can now be specified using the --min-chunk-size option.

• backup_compression = none is supported when using pg_basebackup.

• For PostgreSQL 15 and later: the allowed backup_compression_level values for zstd and lz4 have been updated to match those allowed by pg_basebackup.

• For PostgreSQL versions earlier than 15: backup_compression_level = 0 can now be used with backup_compression = gzip.

Bugfixes

• Fix barman recover on platforms where Multiprocessing uses spawn by default when starting new processes.

3.8.0 (2023-08-31)

Notable changes

• Clarify package installation. barman is packaged with default python version for each operating system.

• The minimum-redundancy option is added to barman-cloud-backup-delete. It allows to set the minimum number of backups that should always be available.

• Add a new primary_checkpoint_timeout configuration option. Allows define the amount of seconds that Barman will wait at the end of a backup if no new WAL files are produced, before forcing a checkpoint on the primary server.

Bugfixes

• Fix race condition in barman retention policies application. Backup deletions will now raise a warning if another deletion is in progress for the requested backup.

• Fix barman-cloud-backup-show man page installation.

3.7.0 (2023-07-25)

Notable changes

• Support is added for snapshot backups on AWS using EBS volumes.

• The --profile option in the barman-cloud-* scripts is renamed --aws-profile. The old name is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

• Backup manifests can now be generated automatically on completion of a backup made with backup_method = rsync. This is enabled by setting the autogenerate_manifest configuration variable and can be overridden using the --manifest and --no-manifest CLI options.

Bugfixes

• The barman-cloud-* scripts now correctly use continuation tokens to page through objects in AWS S3-compatible object stores. This fixes a bug where barman-cloud-backup-delete would only delete the oldest 1000 eligible WALs after backup deletion.

• Minor documentation fixes.

3.6.0 (2023-06-15)

Notable changes

• PostgreSQL version 10 is no longer supported.

• Support is added for snapshot backups on Microsoft Azure using Managed Disks.

• The --snapshot-recovery-zone option is renamed --gcp-zone for consistency with other provider-specific options. The old name is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

• The snapshot_zone option and --snapshot-zone argument are renamed gcp_zone and --gcp-zone respectively. The old names are deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

• The snapshot_gcp_project option and --snapshot-gcp-project argument are renamed to gcp_project and --gcp-project. The old names are deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

Bugfixes

• Barman will no longer attempt to execute the replication-status command for a passive node.

• The backup_label is deleted from cloud storage when a snapshot backup is deleted with barman-cloud-backup-delete.

• Man pages for the generate-manifest and verify-backup commands are added.

• Minor documentation fixes.

3.5.0 (2023-03-29)

Notable changes

• Python 2.7 is no longer supported. The earliest Python version supported is now 3.6.

• The barman, barman-cli and barman-cli-cloud packages for EL7 now require python 3.6 instead of python 2.7. For other supported platforms, Barman packages already require python versions 3.6 or later so packaging is unaffected.

• Support for PostgreSQL 10 will be discontinued in future Barman releases; 3.5.x is the last version of Barman with support for PostgreSQL 10.

• Backups and WALs uploaded to Google Cloud Storage can now be encrypted using a specific KMS key by using the --kms-key-name option with barman-cloud-backup or barman-cloud-wal-archive.

• Backups and WALs uploaded to AWS S3 can now be encrypted using a specific KMS key by using the --sse-kms-key-id option with barman-cloud-backup or barman-cloud-wal-archive along with --encryption=aws:kms.

• Two new configuration options are provided which make it possible to limit the rate at which parallel workers are started during backups with backup_method = rsync and recoveries. parallel_jobs_start_batch_size can be set to limit the amount of parallel workers which will be started in a single batch, and parallel_jobs_start_batch_period can be set to define the time in seconds over which a single batch of workers will be started. These can be overridden using the arguments --jobs-start-batch-size and --jobs-start-batch-period with the barman backup and barman recover commands.

• A new option --recovery-conf-filename is added to barman recover. This can be used to change the file to which Barman should write the PostgreSQL recovery options from the default postgresql.auto.conf to an alternative location.

Bugfixes

• Fix a bug which prevented barman-cloud-backup-show from displaying the backup metadata for backups made with barman backup and uploaded by barman-cloud-backup as a post-backup hook script.

• Fix a bug where the PostgreSQL connection used to validate backup compression settings was left open until termination of the Barman command.

• Fix an issue which caused rsync-concurrent backups to fail when running for a duration greater than idle_session_timeout.

• Fix a bug where the backup name was not saved in the backup metadata if the --wait flag was used with barman backup.

• Thanks to mojtabash78, mhkarimi1383, epolkerman, barthisrael and hzetters for their contributions.

3.4.0 (2023-01-26)

Notable changes

• This is the last release of Barman which will support Python 2 and new features will henceforth require Python 3.6 or later.

• A new backup_method named snapshot is added. This will create backups by taking snapshots of cloud storage volumes. Currently only Google Cloud Platform is supported however support for AWS and Azure will follow in future Barman releases. Note that this feature requires a minimum Python version of 3.7. Please see the Barman manual for more information.

• Support for snapshot backups is also added to barman-cloud-backup, with minimal support for restoring a snapshot backup added to barman-cloud-restore.

• A new command barman-cloud-backup-show is added which displays backup metadata stored in cloud object storage and is analogous to barman show-backup. This is provided so that snapshot metadata can be easily retrieved at restore time however it is also a convenient way of inspecting metadata for any backup made with barman-cloud-backup.

• The instructions for installing Barman from RPMs in the docs are updated.

• The formatting of NFS requirements in the docs is fixed.

• Supported PostgreSQL versions are updated in the docs (this is a documentation fix only - the minimum supported major version is still 10).

3.3.0 (2022-12-14)

Notable changes

• A backup can now be given a name at backup time using the new --name option supported by the barman backup and barman-cloud-backup commands. The backup name can then be used in place of the backup ID when running commands to interact with backups. Additionally, the commands to list and show backups have been been updated to include the backup name in the plain text and JSON output formats.

• Stricter checking of PostgreSQL version to verify that Barman is running against a supported version of PostgreSQL.

Bugfixes

• Fix inconsistencies between the barman cloud command docs and the help output for those commands.

• Use a new PostgreSQL connection when switching WALs on the primary during the backup of a standby to avoid undefined behaviour such as SSL error messages and failed connections.

• Reduce log volume by changing the default log level of stdout for commands executed in child processes to DEBUG (with the exception of pg_basebackup which is deliberately logged at INFO level due to it being a long-running process where it is frequently useful to see the output during the execution of the command).

3.2.0 (2022-10-20)

Notable changes

• barman-cloud-backup-delete now accepts a --batch-size option which determines the maximum number of objects deleted in a single request.

• All barman-cloud-* commands now accept a --read-timeout option which, when used with the aws-s3 cloud provider, determines the read timeout used by the boto3 library when making requests to S3.

Bugfixes

• Fix the failure of barman recover in cases where backup_compression is set in the Barman configuration but the PostgreSQL server is unavailable.

3.1.0 (2022-09-14)

Notable changes

• Backups taken with backup_method = postgres can now be compressed using lz4 and zstd compression by setting backup_compression = lz4 or backup_compression = zstd respectively. These options are only supported with PostgreSQL 15 (beta) or later.

• A new option backup_compression_workers is available which sets the number of threads used for parallel compression. This is currently only available with backup_method = postgres and backup_compression = zstd.

• A new option primary_conninfo can be set to avoid the need for backups of standbys to wait for a WAL switch to occur on the primary when finalizing the backup. Barman will use the connection string in primary_conninfo to perform WAL switches on the primary when stopping the backup.

• Support for certain Rsync versions patched for CVE-2022-29154 which require a trailing newline in the --files-from argument.

• Allow barman receive-wal maintenance options (--stop, --reset, --drop-slot and --create-slot) to run against inactive servers.

• Add --port option to barman-wal-archive and barman-wal-restore commands so that a custom SSH port can be used without requiring any SSH configuration.

• Various documentation improvements.

• Python 3.5 is no longer supported.

Bugfixes

• Ensure PostgreSQL connections are closed cleanly during the execution of barman cron.

• barman generate-manifest now treats pre-existing backup_manifest files as an error condition.

• backup_manifest files are renamed by appending the backup ID during recovery operations to prevent future backups including an old backup_manifest file.

• Fix epoch timestamps in json output which were not timezone-aware.

• The output of pg_basebackup is now written to the Barman log file while the backup is in progress.

• We thank barthisrael, elhananjair, kraynopp, lucianobotti, and mxey for their contributions to this release.

3.0.1 (2022-06-27)

Bugfixes

• Fix package signing issue in PyPI (same sources as 3.0.0)

3.0.0 (2022-06-23)

Breaking changes

• PostgreSQL versions 9.6 and earlier are no longer supported. If you are using one of these versions you will need to use an earlier version of Barman.

• The default backup mode for Rsync backups is now concurrent rather than exclusive. Exclusive backups have been deprecated since PostgreSQL 9.6 and have been removed in PostgreSQL 15. If you are running Barman against PostgreSQL versions earlier than 15 and want to use exclusive backups you will now need to set exclusive_backup in backup_options.

• The backup metadata stored in the backup.info file for each backup has an extra field. This means that earlier versions of Barman will not work in the presence of any backups taken with 3.0.0. Additionally, users of pg-backup-api will need to upgrade it to version 0.2.0 so that pg-backup-api can work with the updated metadata.

Notable changes

• Backups taken with backup_method = postgres can now be compressed by pg_basebackup by setting the backup_compression config option. Additional options are provided to control the compression level, the backup format and whether the pg_basebackup client or the PostgreSQL server applies the compression. NOTE: Recovery of these backups requires Barman to stage the compressed files on the recovery server in a location specified by the recovery_staging_path option.

• Add support for PostgreSQL 15. Exclusive backups are not supported by PostgreSQL 15 therefore Barman configurations for PostgreSQL 15 servers are not allowed to specify exclusive_backup in backup_options.

• Use custom_compression_magic, if set, when identifying compressed WAL files. This allows Barman to correctly identify uncompressed WALs (such as *.partial files in the streaming directory) and return them instead of attempting to decompress them.

Minor changes

• Various documentation improvements.

Bugfixes

• Fix an ordering bug which caused Barman to log the message "Backup failed issuing start backup command." while handling a failure in the stop backup command.

• Fix a bug which prevented recovery using --target-tli when timelines greater than 9 were present, due to hexadecimal values from WAL segment names being parsed as base 10 integers.

• Fix an import error which occurs when using barman cloud with certain python2 installations due to issues with the enum34 dependency.

• Fix a bug where Barman would not read more than three bytes from a compressed WAL when attempting to identify the magic bytes. This means that any custom compressed WALs using magic longer than three bytes are now decompressed correctly.

• Fix a bug which caused the --immediate-checkpoint flag to be ignored during backups with backup_method = rsync.

2.19 (2022-03-09)

Notable changes

• Change barman diagnose output date format to ISO8601.

• Add Google Cloud Storage (GCS) support to barman cloud.

• Support current and latest recovery targets for the --target-tli option of barman recover.

• Add documentation for installation on SLES.

Bugfixes

• barman-wal-archive --test now returns a non-zero exit code when an error occurs.

• Fix barman-cloud-check-wal-archive behaviour when -t option is used so that it exits after connectivity test.

• barman recover now continues when --no-get-wal is used and "get-wal" is not set in recovery_options.

• Fix barman show-servers --format=json ${server} output for inactive server.

• Check for presence of barman_home in configuration file.

• Passive barman servers will no longer store two copies of the tablespace data when syncing backups taken with backup_method = postgres.

• We thank richyen for his contributions to this release.

2.18 (2022-01-21)

Notable changes

• Add snappy compression algorithm support in barman cloud (requires the optional python-snappy dependency).

• Allow Azure client concurrency parameters to be set when uploading WALs with barman-cloud-wal-archive.

• Add --tags option in barman cloud so that backup files and archived WALs can be tagged in cloud storage (aws and azure).

• Update the barman cloud exit status codes so that there is a dedicated code (2) for connectivity errors.

• Add the commands barman verify-backup and barman generate-manifest to check if a backup is valid.

• Add support for Azure Managed Identity auth in barman cloud which can be enabled with the --credential option.

Bugfixes

• Change barman-cloud-check-wal-archive behavior when bucket does not exist.

• Ensure list-files output is always sorted regardless of the underlying filesystem.

• Man pages for barman-cloud-backup-keep, barman-cloud-backup-delete and barman-cloud-check-wal-archive added to Python packaging.

• We thank richyen and stratakis for their contributions to this release.

2.17 (2021-12-01)

Notable changes

• Resolves a performance regression introduced in version 2.14 which increased copy times for barman backup or barman recover commands when using the --jobs flag.

• Ignore rsync partial transfer errors for sender processes so that such errors do not cause the backup to fail (thanks to barthisrael).

2.16 (2021-11-17)

Notable changes

• Add the commands barman-check-wal-archive and barman-cloud-check-wal-archive to validate if a proposed archive location is safe to use for a new PostgreSQL server.

• Allow Barman to identify WAL that's already compressed using a custom compression scheme to avoid compressing it again.

• Add last_backup_minimum_size and last_wal_maximum_age options to barman check.

Bugfixes

• Use argparse for command line parsing instead of the unmaintained argh module.

• Make timezones consistent for begin_time and end_time.

• We thank chtitux, George Hansper, stratakis, Thoro, and vrms for their contributions to this release.

2.15 (2021-10-12)

Notable changes

• Add plural forms for the list-backup, list-server and show-server commands which are now list-backups, list-servers and show-servers. The singular forms are retained for backward compatibility.

• Add the last-failed backup shortcut which references the newest failed backup in the catalog so that you can do:

  • barman delete <SERVER> last-failed

Bugfixes

• Tablespaces will no longer be omitted from backups of EPAS versions 9.6 and 10 due to an issue detecting the correct version string on older versions of EPAS.

2.14 (2021-09-22)

Notable changes

• Add the barman-cloud-backup-delete command which allows backups in cloud storage to be deleted by specifying either a backup ID or a retention policy.

• Allow backups to be retained beyond any retention policies in force by introducing the ability to tag existing backups as archival backups using barman keep and barman-cloud-backup-keep.

• Allow the use of SAS authentication tokens created at the restricted blob container level (instead of the wider storage account level) for Azure blob storage

• Significantly speed up barman restore into an empty directory for backups that contain hundreds of thousands of files.

Bugfixes

• The backup privileges check will no longer fail if the user lacks "userepl" permissions and will return better error messages if any required permissions are missing (#318 and #319).

2.13 (2021-07-26)

Notable changes

• Add Azure blob storage support to barman-cloud

• Support tablespace remapping in barman-cloud-restore via --tablespace name:location

• Allow barman-cloud-backup and barman-cloud-wal-archive to run as Barman hook scripts, to allow data to be relayed to cloud storage from the Barman server

Bugfixes

• Stop backups failing due to idle_in_transaction_session_timeout #333

• Fix a race condition between backup and archive-wal in updating xlog.db entries (#328)

• Handle PGDATA being a symlink in barman-cloud-backup, which led to "seeking backwards is not allowed" errors on restore (#351)

• Recreate pg_wal on restore if the original was a symlink (#327)

• Recreate pg_tblspc symlinks for tablespaces on restore (#343)

• Make barman-cloud-backup-list skip backups it cannot read, e.g., because they are in Glacier storage (#332)

• Add -d database option to barman-cloud-backup to specify which database to connect to initially (#307)

• Fix "Backup failed uploading data" errors from barman-cloud-backup on Python 3.8 and above, caused by attempting to pickle the boto3 client (#361)

• Correctly enable server-side encryption in S3 for buckets that do not have encryption enabled by default.

  In Barman 2.12, barman-cloud-backup's --encryption option did not correctly enable encryption for the contents of the backup if the backup was stored in an S3 bucket that did not have encryption enabled. If this is the case for you, please consider deleting your old backups and taking new backups with Barman 2.13.

  If your S3 buckets already have encryption enabled by default (which we recommend), this does not affect you.

2.12.1 (2021-06-30)

Bugfixes

• Allow specifying target-tli with other target-* recovery options.
• Fix incorrect NAME in barman-cloud-backup-list manpage.
• Don't raise an error if SIGALRM is ignored.
• Fetch wal_keep_size, not wal_keep_segments, from Postgres 13.

2.12 (2020-11-05)

Notable changes

• Introduce a new backup_method option called local-rsync which targets those cases where Barman is installed on the same server where PostgreSQL is and directly uses rsync to take base backups, bypassing the SSH layer.

Bugfixes

• Avoid corrupting boto connection in worker processes.
• Avoid connection attempts to PostgreSQL during tests.

2.11 (2020-07-09)

Notable changes

• Introduction of the barman-cli-cloud package that contains all cloud related utilities.

• Add barman-cloud-wal-restore to restore a WAL file previously archived with barman-cloud-wal-archive from an object store.

• Add barman-cloud-restore to restore a backup previously taken with barman-cloud-backup from an object store.

• Add barman-cloud-backup-list to list backups taken with barman-cloud-backup in an object store.

• Add support for arbitrary archive size for barman-cloud-backup.

• Add support for --endpoint-url option to cloud utilities.

• Remove strict superuser requirement for PG 10+ (by Kaarel Moppel).

• Add --log-level runtime option for barman to override default log level for a specific command.

• Support for PostgreSQL 13

Bugfixes

• Suppress messages and warning with SSH connections in barman-cli (GH-257).
• Fix a race condition when retrieving uploaded parts in barman-cloud-backup (GH-259).
• Close the PostgreSQL connection after a backup (GH-258).
• Check for uninitialized replication slots in receive-wal --reset (GH-260).
• Ensure that begin_wal is valorised before acting on it (GH-262).
• Fix bug in XLOG/WAL arithmetic with custom segment size (GH-287).
• Fix rsync compatibility error with recent rsync.
• Fix PostgreSQLClient version parsing.
• Fix PostgreSQL exception handling with non ASCII messages.
• Ensure each postgres connection has an empty search_path.
• Avoid connecting to PostgreSQL while reading a backup.info file.

If you are using already barman-cloud-wal-archive or barman-cloud-backup installed via RPM/Apt package and you are upgrading your system, you must install the barman-cli-cloud package. All cloud related tools are now part of the barman-cli-cloud package, including barman-cloud-wal-archive and barman-cloud-backup that were previously shipped with barman-cli. The reason is complex dependency management of the boto3 library, which is a requirement for the cloud utilities.

2.10 (2019-12-05)

Notable changes

• Pull .partial WAL files with get-wal and barman-wal-restore, allowing restore_command in a recovery scenario to fetch a partial WAL file's content from the Barman server. This feature simplifies and enhances RPO=0 recovery operations.

• Store the PostgreSQL system identifier in the server directory and inside the backup information file. Improve check command to verify the consistency of the system identifier with active connections (standard and replication) and data on disk.

• A new script called barman-cloud-wal-archive has been added to the barman-cli package to directly ship WAL files from PostgreSQL (using archive_command) to cloud object storage services that are compatible with AWS S3. It supports encryption and compression.

• A new script called barman-cloud-backup has been added to the barman-cli package to directly ship base backups from a local PostgreSQL server to cloud object storage services that are compatible with AWS S3. It supports encryption, parallel upload, compression.

• Automated creation of replication slots through the server/global option create_slot. When set to auto, Barman creates the replication slot, in case streaming_archiver is enabled and slot_name is defined. The default value is manual for back-compatibility.

• Add '-w/--wait' option to backup command, making Barman wait for all required WAL files to be archived before considering the backup completed. Add also the --wait-timeout option (default 0, no timeout).

• Redact passwords from Barman output, in particular from barman diagnose (InfoSec)

• Improve robustness of receive-wal --reset command, by verifying that the last partial file is aligned with the current location or, if present, with replication slot's.

• Documentation improvements

Bugfixes

• Wrong string matching operation when excluding tablespaces inside PGDATA (GH-245).
• Minor fixes in WAL delete hook scripts (GH-240).
• Fix PostgreSQL connection aliveness check (GH-239).

2.9 (2019-08-01)

Notable changes

• Transparently support PostgreSQL 12, by supporting the new way of managing recovery and standby settings through GUC options and signal files (recovery.signal and standby.signal)

• Add --bwlimit command line option to set bandwidth limitation for backup and recover commands

• Ignore WAL archive failure for check command in case the latest backup is WAITING_FOR_WALS

• Add --target-lsn option to set recovery target Log Sequence Number for recover command with PostgreSQL 10 or higher

• Add --spool-dir option to barman-wal-restore so that users can change the spool directory location from the default, avoiding conflicts in case of multiple PostgreSQL instances on the same server (thanks to Drazen Kacar).

• Rename barman_xlog directory to barman_wal

• JSON output writer to export command output as JSON objects and facilitate integration with external tools and systems (thanks to Marcin Onufry Hlybin). Experimental in this release.

Bugfixes

• replication-status doesn’t show streamers with no slot (GH-222)

• When checking that a connection is alive (“SELECT 1” query), preserve the status of the PostgreSQL connection (GH-149). This fixes those cases of connections that were terminated due to idle-in-transaction timeout, causing concurrent backups to fail.

2.8 (2019-05-17)

Notable changes

• Add support for reuse_backup in geo-redundancy for incremental backup copy in passive nodes

• Improve performance of rsync based copy by using strptime instead of the more generic dateutil.parser (#210)

• Add ‘--test’ option to barman-wal-archive and barman-wal-restore to verify the connection with the Barman server

• Complain if backup_options is not explicitly set, as the future default value will change from exclusive_backup to concurrent_backup when PostgreSQL 9.5 will be declared EOL by the PGDG

• Display additional settings in the show-server and diagnose commands: archive_timeout, data_checksums, hot_standby, max_wal_senders, max_replication_slots and wal_compression.

• Merge the barman-cli project in Barman

Minor changes

• Improve messaging of check --nagios for inactive servers.
• Log remote SSH command with recover command.
• Hide logical decoding connections in replication-status command.

This release officially supports Python 3 and deprecates Python 2 (which might be discontinued in future releases).

PostgreSQL 9.3 and older is deprecated from this release of Barman. Support for backup from standby is now limited to PostgreSQL 9.4 or higher and to WAL shipping from the standby (please refer to the documentation for details).

Bugfixes

• Fix encoding error in get-wal on Python 3 (Jeff Janes, #221).
• Fix exclude_and_protect_filter (Jeff Janes, #217).
• Remove spurious message when resetting WAL (Jeff Janes, #215).
• Fix sync-wals error if primary has WALs older than the first backup.
• Support for double quotes in synchronous_standby_names setting.

2.7 (2019-03-12)

Notable changes

• Fix error handling during the parallel backup. Previously an unrecoverable error during the copy could have corrupted the barman internal state, requiring a manual kill of barman process with SIGTERM and a manual cleanup of the running backup in PostgreSQL. (GH#199).

• Fix support of UTF-8 characters in input and output (GH#194 and GH#196).

• Ignore history/backup/partial files for first sync of geo-redundancy (GH#198).

• Fix network failure with geo-redundancy causing cron to break (GH#202).

• Fix backup validation in PostgreSQL older than 9.2.

• Various documentation fixes.

2.6 (2019-02-04)

Notable changes

• 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.

Bugfixes

• 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.

2.5 (2018-10-23)

Notable changes

• Add support for PostgreSQL 11

• Add check-backup command to verify that WAL files required for consistency of a base backup are present in the archive. Barman now adds a new state (WAITING_FOR_WALS) after completing a base backup, and sets it to DONE once it has verified that all WAL files from start to the end of the backup exist. This command is included in the regular cron maintenance job. Barman now notifies users attempting to recover a backup that is in WAITING_FOR_WALS state.

• Allow switch-xlog --archive to work on a standby (just for the archive part)

Bugfixes

• Fix decoding errors reading external commands output (issue #174).

• Fix documentation regarding WAL streaming and backup from standby.

2.4 (2018-05-25)

Notable changes

• Add standard and retry hook scripts for backup deletion (pre/post).
• Add standard and retry hook scripts for recovery (pre/post).
• Add standard and retry hook scripts for WAL deletion (pre/post).
• Add --standby-mode option to barman recover to add standby_mode = on in pre-generated recovery.conf.
• Add --target-action option to barman recover, allowing users to add shutdown, pause or promote to the pre-generated recovery.conf file.
• Improve usability of point-in-time recovery with consistency checks (e.g. recovery time is after end time of backup).
• Minor documentation improvements.
• Drop support for Python 3.3.

Bugfixes

• Fix remote get_file_content method (GitHub #151), preventing incremental recovery from happening.
• Unicode issues with command (GitHub #143 and #150).
• Add --wal-method=none when pg_basebackup >= 10 (GitHub #133).
• Stop process manager module from overwriting lock files content
• Relax the rules for rsync output parsing
• Ignore vanished files in streaming directory
• Case insensitive slot names (GitHub #170)
• Make DataTransferFailure.from_command_error() more resilient (GitHub #86)
• Rename command() to barman_command() (GitHub #118)
• Initialise synchronous standby names list if not set (GitHub #111)
• Correct placeholders ordering (GitHub #138)
• Force datestyle to iso for replication connections
• Returns error if delete command does not remove the backup
• Fix exception when calling is_power_of_two(None)
• Downgraded sync standby names messages to debug (GitHub #89)

2.3 (2017-09-05)

Notable changes

• Add support to PostgreSQL 10

• Follow naming changes in PostgreSQL 10:

  • The switch-xlog command has been renamed to switch-wal.
  • In commands output, the xlog word has been changed to WAL and location has been changed to LSN when appropriate.

• Add the --network-compression/--no-network-compression options to barman recover to enable or disable network compression at run-time

• Add --target-immediate option to recover command, in order to exit recovery when a consistent state is reached (end of the backup, available from PostgreSQL 9.4)

• Show cluster state (master or standby) with barman status command

• Documentation improvements

Bugfixes

• Fix high memory usage with parallel_jobs > 1 (#116)
• Better handling of errors using parallel copy (#114)
• Make barman diagnose more robust with system exceptions
• Let archive-wal ignore files with .tmp extension

2.2 (2017-07-17)

Notable changes

• Implement parallel copy for backup/recovery through the parallel_jobs global/server option to be overridden by the --jobs or -j runtime option for the backup and recover command. Parallel backup is available only for the rsync copy method. By default, it is set to 1 (for behaviour compatibility with previous versions).

• Support custom WAL size for PostgreSQL 8.4 and newer. At backup time, Barman retrieves from PostgreSQL wal_segment_size and wal_block_size values and computes the necessary calculations.

• Improve check command to ensure that incoming directory is empty when archiver=off, and streaming directory is empty when streaming_archiver=off (#80).

• Add external_configuration to backup_options so that users can instruct Barman to ignore backup of configuration files when they are not inside PGDATA (default for Debian/Ubuntu installations). In this case, Barman does not display a warning anymore.

• Add --get-wal and --no-get-wal options to barman recover

• Add max_incoming_wals_queue global/server option for the check command so that a non blocking error is returned in case incoming WAL directories for both archiver and the streaming_archiver contain more files than the specified value.

• Documentation improvements

• File format changes:

  • The format of backup.info file has changed. For this reason a backup taken with Barman 2.2 cannot be read by a previous version of Barman. But, backups taken by previous versions can be read by Barman 2.2.

Bugfixes

• Allow replication-status to work against a standby
• Close any PostgreSQL connection before starting pg_basebackup (#104, #108)
• Safely handle paths containing special characters
• Archive .partial files after promotion of streaming source
• Recursively create directories during recovery (SF#44)
• Improve xlog.db locking (#99)
• Remove tablespace_map file during recover (#95)
• Reconnect to PostgreSQL if connection drops (SF#82)

2.1 (2017-01-05)

Notable changes

• Add --archive and --archive-timeout options to switch-xlog command.

• Preliminary support for PostgreSQL 10 (#73).

• Minor additions:

  • Add last archived WAL info to diagnose output.
  • Add start time and execution time to the output of delete command.

Bugfixes

• Return failure for get-wal command on inactive server
• Make streaming_archiver_names and streaming_backup_name options global (#57)
• Fix rsync failures due to files truncated during transfer (#64)
• Correctly handle compressed history files (#66)
• Avoid de-referencing symlinks in pg_tblspc when preparing recovery (#55)
• Fix comparison of last archiving failure (#40, #58)
• Avoid failing recovery if postgresql.conf is not writable (#68)
• Fix output of replication-status command (#56)
• Exclude files from backups like pg_basebackup (#65, #72)
• Exclude directories from other Postgres versions while copying tablespaces (#74)
• Make retry hook script options global

2.0 (2016-09-27)

Notable changes

• Support for pg_basebackup and base backups over the PostgreSQL streaming replication protocol with backup_method=postgres (PostgreSQL 9.1 or higher required)

• Support for physical replication slots through the slot_name configuration option as well as the --create-slot and --drop-slot options for the receive-wal command (PostgreSQL 9.4 or higher required). When slot_name is specified and streaming_archiver is enabled, receive-wal transparently integrates with pg_receivexlog, and check makes sure that slots exist and are actively used

• Support for the new backup API introduced in PostgreSQL 9.6, which transparently enables concurrent backups and backups from standby servers using the standard rsync method of backup. Concurrent backup was only possible for PostgreSQL 9.2 to 9.5 versions through the pgespresso extension. The new backup API will make pgespresso redundant in the future

• If properly configured, Barman can function as a synchronous standby in terms of WAL streaming. By properly setting the streaming_archiver_name in the synchronous_standby_names priority list on the master, and enabling replication slot support, the receive-wal command can now be part of a PostgreSQL synchronous replication cluster, bringing RPO=0 (PostgreSQL 9.5.5 or higher required)

• Introduce barman-wal-restore, a standard and robust script written in Python that can be used as restore_command in recovery.conf files of any standby server of a cluster. It supports remote parallel fetching of WAL files by efficiently invoking get-wal through SSH. Currently available as a separate project called barman-cli. The barman-cli package is required for remote recovery when get-wal is listed in recovery_options

• Control the maximum execution time of the check command through the check_timeout global/server configuration option (30 seconds by default)

• Limit the number of WAL segments that are processed by an archive-wal run, through the archiver_batch_size and streaming_archiver_batch_size global/server options which control archiving of WAL segments coming from, respectively, the standard archiver and receive-wal

• Removed locking of the XLOG database during check operations

• The show-backup command is now aware of timelines and properly displays which timelines can be used as recovery targets for a given base backup. Internally, Barman is now capable of parsing .history files

• Improved the logic behind the retry mechanism when copy operations experience problems. This involves backup (rsync and postgres) as well as remote recovery (rsync)

• Code refactoring involving remote command and physical copy interfaces

Bugfixes

• Correctly handle .history files from streaming
• Fix replication-status on PostgreSQL 9.1
• Fix replication-status when sent and write locations are not available
• Fix misleading message on pg_receivexlog termination

1.6.1 (2016-05-23)

Minor changes

• Add --peek option to get-wal command to discover existing WAL files from the Barman's archive

• Add replication-status command for monitoring the status of any streaming replication clients connected to the PostgreSQL server. The --target option allows users to limit the request to only hot standby servers or WAL streaming clients

• Add the switch-xlog command to request a switch of a WAL file to the PostgreSQL server. Through the '--force' it issues a CHECKPOINT beforehand

• Add streaming_archiver_name option, which sets a proper application_name to pg_receivexlog when streaming_archiver is enabled (only for PostgreSQL 9.3 and above)

• Check for superuser privileges with PostgreSQL's standard connections (#30)

• Check the WAL archive is never empty

• Check for 'backup_label' on the master when server is down

• Improve barman-wal-restore contrib script

Bugfixes

• Treat the "failed backups" check as non-fatal
• Rename '-x' option for get-wal as '-z'
• Add archive_mode=always support for PostgreSQL 9.5 (#32)
• Properly close PostgreSQL connections when necessary
• Fix receive-wal for pg_receive_xlog version 9.2

1.6.0 (2016-02-29)

Notable changes

• Support for streaming replication connection through the streaming_conninfo server option

• Support for the streaming_archiver option that allows Barman to receive WAL files through PostgreSQL's native streaming protocol. When set to 'on', it relies on pg_receivexlog to receive WAL data, reducing Recovery Point Objective. Currently, WAL streaming is an additional feature (standard log archiving is still required)

• Implement the receive-wal command that, when streaming_archiver is on, wraps pg_receivexlog for WAL streaming. Add --stop option to stop receiving WAL files via streaming protocol. Add --reset option to reset the streaming status and restart from the current xlog in Postgres.

• Automatic management (startup and stop) of receive-wal command via cron command

• Support for the path_prefix configuration option

• Introduction of the archiver option (currently fixed to on) which enables continuous WAL archiving for a specific server, through log shipping via PostgreSQL's archive_command

• Support for streaming_wals_directory and errors_directory options

• Management of WAL duplicates in archive-wal command and integration with check command

• Verify if pg_receivexlog is running in check command when streaming_archiver is enabled

• Verify if failed backups are present in check command

• Accept compressed WAL files in incoming directory

• Add support for the pigz compressor (thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli [email protected])

• Implement pygzip and pybzip2 compressors (based on an initial idea of Christoph Moench-Tegeder [email protected])

• Creation of an implicit restore point at the end of a backup

• Current size of the PostgreSQL data files in barman status

• Permit archive_mode=always for PostgreSQL 9.5 servers (thanks to Christoph Moench-Tegeder [email protected])

• Complete refactoring of the code responsible for connecting to PostgreSQL

• Improve messaging of cron command regarding sub-processes

• Native support for Python >= 3.3

• Changes of behaviour:

  • Stop trashing WAL files during archive-wal (commit:e3a1d16)

Bugfixes

• Atomic WAL file archiving (#9 and #12)
• Propagate "-c" option to any Barman subprocess (#19)
• Fix management of backup ID during backup deletion (#22)
• Improve archive-wal robustness and log messages (#24)
• Improve error handling in case of missing parameters

1.5.1 (2015-11-16)

Minor changes

• Add support for the 'archive-wal' command which performs WAL maintenance operations on a given server
• Add support for "per-server" concurrency of the 'cron' command
• Improved management of xlog.db errors
• Add support for mixed compression types in WAL files (SF.net#61)

Bugfixes

• Avoid retention policy checks during the recovery
• Avoid 'wal_level' check on PostgreSQL version < 9.0 (#3)
• Fix backup size calculation (#5)

1.5.0 (2015-09-28)

Notable changes

• Add support for the get-wal command which allows users to fetch any WAL file from the archive of a specific server
• Add support for retry hook scripts, a special kind of hook scripts that Barman tries to run until they succeed
• Add active configuration option for a server to temporarily disable the server by setting it to False
• Add barman_lock_directory global option to change the location of lock files (by default: 'barman_home')
• Execute the full suite of checks before starting a backup, and skip it in case one or more checks fail
• Forbid to delete a running backup
• Analyse include directives of a PostgreSQL server during backup and recover operations
• Add check for conflicting paths in the configuration of Barman, both intra (by temporarily disabling a server) and inter-server (by refusing any command, to any server).
• Add check for wal_level
• Add barman-wal-restore script to be used as restore_command on a standby server, in conjunction with barman get-wal
• Implement a standard and consistent policy for error management
• Improved cache management of backups
• Improved management of configuration in unit tests
• Tutorial and man page sources have been converted to Markdown format
• Add code documentation through Sphinx
• Complete refactor of the code responsible for managing the backup and the recover commands
• Changed internal directory structure of a backup
• Introduce copy_method option (currently fixed to rsync)

Bugfixes

• Manage options without '=' in PostgreSQL configuration files
• Preserve Timeline history files (Fixes: #70)
• Workaround for rsync on SUSE Linux (Closes: #13 and #26)
• Disables dangerous settings in postgresql.auto.conf (Closes: #68)

1.4.1 (2015-05-05)

Minor changes

• Improved management of xlogdb file, which is now correctly fsynced when updated. Also, the rebuild-xlogdb command now operates on a temporary new file, which overwrites the main one when finished.
• Add unit tests for dateutil module compatibility
• Modified Barman version following PEP 440 rules and added support of tests in Python 3.4

Bugfixes

• Fix for WAL archival stop working if first backup is EMPTY (Closes: #64)
• Fix exception during error handling in Barman recovery (Closes: #65)
• After a backup, limit cron activity to WAL archiving only (Closes: #62)
• Improved robustness and error reporting of the backup delete command (Closes: #63)
• Fix computation of WAL production ratio as reported in the show-backup command

1.4.0 (2015-01-26)

Notable changes

• Incremental base backup implementation through the reuse_backup global/server option. Possible values are off (disabled, default), copy (preventing unmodified files from being transferred) and link (allowing for deduplication through hard links).
• Store and show deduplication effects when using reuse_backup= link.
• Added transparent support of pg_stat_archiver (PostgreSQL 9.4) in check, show-server and status commands.
• Improved administration by invoking WAL maintenance at the end of a successful backup.
• Changed the way unused WAL files are trashed, by differentiating between concurrent and exclusive backup cases.
• Improved performance of WAL statistics calculation.
• Treat a missing pg_ident.conf as a WARNING rather than an error.
• Refactored output layer by removing remaining yield calls.
• Check that rsync is in the system path.
• Include history files in WAL management.
• Improved robustness through more unit tests.

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug #55: Ignore fsync EINVAL errors on directories.
• Fixed bug #58: retention policies delete.

1.3.3 (2014-08-21)

Notable changes

• 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

Bugfixes

• Copies "recovery.conf" on the remote server during "barman recover" (#45)
• Correctly detect pre/post archive hook scripts (#41)

1.3.2 (2014-04-15)

Bugfixes

• Fixed incompatibility with PostgreSQL 8.4 (Closes #40, bug introduced in version 1.3.1)

1.3.1 (2014-04-14)

Minor changes

• Added support for concurrent backup of PostgreSQL 9.2 and 9.3 servers that use the "pgespresso" extension. This feature is controlled by the "backup_options" configuration option (global/ server) and activated when set to "concurrent_backup". Concurrent backup allows DBAs to perform full backup operations from a streaming replicated standby.
• Added the "barman diagnose" command which prints important information about the Barman system (extremely useful for support and problem solving)
• Improved error messages and exception handling interface

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug in recovery of tablespaces that are created inside the PGDATA directory (bug introduced in version 1.3.0)
• Fixed minor bug of unhandled -q option, for quiet mode of commands to be used in cron jobs (bug introduced in version 1.3.0)
• Minor bug fixes and code refactoring

1.3.0 (2014-02-03)

Notable changes

• Refactored BackupInfo class for backup metadata to use the new FieldListFile class (infofile module)

• Refactored output layer to use a dedicated module, in order to facilitate integration with Nagios (NagiosOutputWriter class)

• Refactored subprocess handling in order to isolate stdin/stderr/ stdout channels (command_wrappers module)

• Refactored hook scripts management

• Extracted logging configuration and userid enforcement from the configuration class.

• Support for hook scripts to be executed before and after a WAL file is archived, through the 'pre_archive_script' and 'post_archive_script' configuration options.

• Implemented immediate checkpoint capability with --immediate-checkpoint command option and 'immediate_checkpoint' configuration option

• Implemented network compression for remote backup and recovery through the 'network_compression' configuration option (#19)

• Implemented the 'rebuild-xlogdb' command (Closes #27 and #28)

• Added deduplication of tablespaces located inside the PGDATA directory

• Refactored remote recovery code to work the same way local recovery does, by performing remote directory preparation (assuming the remote user has the right permissions on the remote server)

• 'barman backup' now tries and create server directories before attempting to execute a full backup (#14)

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug #22: improved documentation for tablespaces relocation

• Fixed bug #31: 'barman cron' checks directory permissions for lock file

• Fixed bug #32: xlog.db read access during cron activities

1.2.3 (2013-09-05)

Minor changes

• Added support for PostgreSQL 9.3

• Added support for the "--target-name" recovery option, which allows to restore to a named point previously specified with pg_create_restore_point (only for PostgreSQL 9.1 and above users)

• Introduced Python 3 compatibility

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug #27 about flock() usage with barman.lockfile (many thanks to Damon Snyder [email protected])

1.2.2 (2013-06-24)

Bugfixes

• Fix python 2.6 compatibility

1.2.1 (2013-06-17)

Minor changes

• Added the "bandwidth_limit" global/server option which allows to limit the I/O bandwidth (in KBPS) for backup and recovery operations

• Added the "tablespace_bandwidth_limit" global/server option which allows to limit the I/O bandwidth (in KBPS) for backup and recovery operations on a per tablespace basis

• Added /etc/barman/barman.conf as default location

Bugfixes

• Avoid triggering the minimum_redundancy check on FAILED backups (thanks to Jérôme Vanandruel)

1.2.0 (2013-01-31)

Notable changes

• Added the "retention_policy_mode" global/server option which defines the method for enforcing retention policies (currently only "auto")

• Added the "minimum_redundancy" global/server option which defines the minimum number of backups to be kept for a server

• Added the "retention_policy" global/server option which defines retention policies management based on redundancy (e.g. REDUNDANCY 4) or recovery window (e.g. RECOVERY WINDOW OF 3 MONTHS)

• Added retention policy support to the logging infrastructure, the "check" and the "status" commands

• The "check" command now integrates minimum redundancy control

• Added retention policy states (valid, obsolete and potentially obsolete) to "show-backup" and "list-backup" commands

• The 'all' keyword is now forbidden as server name

• Added basic support for Nagios plugin output to the 'check' command through the --nagios option

• Barman now requires argh => 0.21.2 and argcomplete-

• Minor bug fixes

1.1.2 (2012-11-29)

Minor changes

• Added "configuration_files_directory" option that allows to include multiple server configuration files from a directory

• Support for special backup IDs: latest, last, oldest, first

• Management of multiple servers to the 'list-backup' command. 'barman list-backup all' now list backups for all the configured servers.

• Added "application_name" management for PostgreSQL >= 9.0

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug #18: ignore missing WAL files if not found during delete

1.1.1 (2012-10-16)

Bugfixes

• Fix regressions in recover command.

1.1.0 (2012-10-12)

Notable changes

• Support for hook scripts to be executed before and after a 'backup' command through the 'pre_backup_script' and 'post_backup_script' configuration options.

• Management of multiple servers to the 'backup' command. 'barman backup all' now iteratively backs up all the configured servers.

• Add warning in recovery when file location options have been defined in the postgresql.conf file (issue #10)

• Fail fast on recover command if the destination directory contains the ':' character (Closes: #4) or if an invalid tablespace relocation rule is passed

• Report an informative message when pg_start_backup() invocation fails because an exclusive backup is already running (Closes: #8)

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug #9: "9.2 issue with pg_tablespace_location()"

1.0.0 (2012-07-06)

Notable changes

• Backup of multiple PostgreSQL servers, with different versions. Versions from PostgreSQL 8.4+ are supported.

• Support for secure remote backup (through SSH)

• Management of a catalog of backups for every server, allowing users to easily create new backups, delete old ones or restore them

• Compression of WAL files that can be configured on a per server basis using compression/decompression filters, both predefined (gzip and bzip2) or custom

• Support for INI configuration file with global and per-server directives. Default location for configuration files are /etc/barman.conf or ~/.barman.conf. The '-c' option allows users to specify a different one

• Simple indexing of base backups and WAL segments that does not require a local database

• Maintenance mode (invoked through the 'cron' command) which performs ordinary operations such as WAL archival and compression, catalog updates, etc.

• Added the 'backup' command which takes a full physical base backup of the given PostgreSQL server configured in Barman

• Added the 'recover' command which performs local recovery of a given backup, allowing DBAs to specify a point in time. The 'recover' command supports relocation of both the PGDATA directory and, where applicable, the tablespaces

• Added the '--remote-ssh-command' option to the 'recover' command for remote recovery of a backup. Remote recovery does not currently support relocation of tablespaces

• Added the 'list-server' command that lists all the active servers that have been configured in barman

• Added the 'show-server' command that shows the relevant information for a given server, including all configuration options

• Added the 'status' command which shows information about the current state of a server, including Postgres version, current transaction ID, archive command, etc.

• Added the 'check' command which returns 0 if everything Barman needs is functioning correctly

• Added the 'list-backup' command that lists all the available backups for a given server, including size of the base backup and total size of the related WAL segments

• Added the 'show-backup' command that shows the relevant information for a given backup, including time of start, size, number of related WAL segments and their size, etc.

• Added the 'delete' command which removes a backup from the catalog

• Added the 'list-files' command which lists all the files for a single backup

• RPM Package for RHEL 5/6