Starting and Stopping

If a standby is promoted for testing, or a test cluster is restored from a production backup, then it is a good idea to prevent those clusters from writing to pgBackRest repositories. This can be accomplished with the stop command.

The commands that write and are blocked by stop are: archive-push, backup, expire, stanza-create, and stanza-upgrade. Note that stanza-delete is an exception to this rule (see Delete a Stanza for more details).

Stop write commands

pgbackrest stop

New pgBackRest write commands will no longer run.

Attempt a backup

pgbackrest --stanza=demo backup

Specify the --force option to terminate any pgBackRest write commands that are currently running. This includes asynchronous archive-get (though it will run again if PostgreSQL requires it). If pgBackRest is already stopped then stopping again will generate a warning.

Stop the services again

pgbackrest stop

Start pgBackRest write commands again with the start command. Write commands that were in progress before the stop will not automatically start again, but they are now allowed to start.

Start write commands

pgbackrest start

It is also possible to stop pgBackRest for a single stanza.

Stop write commands for the demo stanza

pgbackrest --stanza=demo stop

New pgBackRest write commands for the specified stanza will no longer run.

Attempt a backup

pgbackrest --stanza=demo backup

The stanza must also be specified when starting pgBackRest write commands for a single stanza.

Start write commands for the demo stanza

pgbackrest --stanza=demo start