pgBackRest

Releases

v2.60.0 — Page Checksum Errors and Object Store Prefetch

Released: 2026-10-18

Core Features

• Add checksum-page-error option to error on invalid page checksums. This option applies to the backup, restore, and expire commands. The backup command defaults to a warning for each file (as before) and now also reports the total number of checksum warnings at the end of the backup. The restore and expire commands default to an error. Previously the restore command did not report invalid page checksums at all.

• Support for GCS Workload Identity Federation. Set repo-gcs-key-type=web-id and set repo-gcs-key to an external account credential file, e.g. as generated by gcloud iam workload-identity-pools create-cred-config. The web identity token is exchanged for an access token without a service account key. The token file is reloaded on each exchange to pick up rotated tokens, e.g. Kubernetes projected service account tokens. Service account impersonation is not supported.

• Prefetch multi-file/range reads from object stores. Requests are queued ahead of the current read so requests proceed while reading, and small gaps between files are read over instead of starting a new request. Restore uses this to read bundled files and block incremental maps, and backup uses it to read block incremental maps from the prior backup. repo-storage-prefetch (default 3) sets how many requests are queued and repo-storage-read-over (default 64KiB) sets the largest gap that is read over.

Core Improvements

• Reduce keep-alive requests to remote processes. A keep-alive was sent to every remote each time a job completed in archive-push and backup, even when the remotes had just been sent a request. A keep-alive is now sent only when no request has been sent to the remote for 30 seconds.

• Retry Azure batch sub-requests missing from the response. When Azure fails a batch delete it may return a single response for the entire batch. The sub-requests with no response were treated as complete, so only one file per batch was removed while the command reported success. Sub-requests with no response are now retried.

• Reduce the manifest checks made when reconstructing backup.info. The backup, expire, and annotate commands no longer check for a backup.manifest when the repository listing shows the backup path does not exist, or when a diff or incr backup belongs to a full backup set that is not in backup.info. Each check is a request so on an object store the check for a missing manifest is logged as a 404.

• Use original size to determine if a file should be bundled. The size of a block incremental file in the prior backup was used to decide whether to bundle it, so a file that had grown past repo-bundle-limit could still be stored in a bundle. The current size of the file is now used.

• Add context to block map read errors during backup. An error reading the block map of a prior backup now reports the file, repository path, offset, and map size. A read that returns fewer bytes than expected is reported as such instead of as a parse error.

• Cast current_timestamp to text in the backup start label. A user-defined implicit cast from timestamptz to text caused the backup to fail with "operator is not unique: unknown || timestamp with time zone". The label text is unchanged.

• Support building on illumos. An OmniOS job has been added to CI. Solaris may also work but has not been tested.

• Support OpenSSL 4. Building against OpenSSL 4 failed because X509_get_subject_name() now returns a const name.

• Fix clang builds. On Linux, gcc installs libbacktrace.a where clang also looks for it but installs backtrace.h where only gcc can find it. A clang build found the library and then failed to compile. The library is now only used when its header is found. Return types that clang reports as narrowing conversions in debug builds are also fixed.

• Migrate code generation from C to Python. Code is generated during the build from the option, error, help, and PostgreSQL declarations by a Python tool instead of a C tool that had to be built first. Building from a git checkout requires PyYAML instead of libyaml. The release tarball includes the generated code and requires neither.

Core Development

• General framework for new repository formats.

• Derive the cipher key with SHA-256 for repository format 6.

• Add archive key rotation for repository format 6.

• Reuse large freed allocations from a memory context free list.

• Remove the repo-put command and the cipher-pass option.

• Replace deprecated OpenSSL APIs.

• Fix out-of-bounds reads found by Fil-C.

• Fix bugs in the JSON and pack readers found by fuzzing.

• Refactor the backup and restore modules into included modules.

• Remove unused parameters and struct members.

• Check that block macros are closed by the macro that matches them.

• Improve code generation for the help and PostgreSQL interfaces.

• Fix minor issues.

• Store the file owner as an index rather than a pointer in the pack.

• Increase the minimum meson version to 0.55.3.

• Check the unity build object for unexpected exported symbols.

• Add a line length linter and fix formatting issues.

• Fix typos.

Documentation Improvements

• Modernize the website. Special thanks to Jan for the insightful (and hilarious) logo. The website has a new design with light and dark themes and a layout that works on phones. Pages with a table of contents show it beside the text and mark the section being read. Commands and config files can be copied with a button, config files mark the lines each section changes, and release notes can be expanded to show more detail.

• Document the release schedule. Feature releases are scheduled for the third Monday of January, April, July, and October. Patch releases are scheduled for the third Monday of any other month as required. The release notes introduction also describes the major, minor, and patch parts of a release number.

• Migrate the documentation tools from C and Perl to Python. The documentation is built by doc/doc.py instead of a C tool run by doc/doc.pl, and building the documentation no longer requires Perl.

Documentation Development

• Generate DIST.md from XML and improve the generated markdown.

• Check documentation links and option allow lists.

• Improve the documentation build and deploy.

• Improve the documentation build containers.

• Merge coding standards into the contributing guide.

Test Improvements

• Migrate the test harness from C and Perl to Python. Tests are run with test/test.py instead of test/test.pl. The test containers and CI runners no longer require Perl and the harness is covered by tests.

• Add a Fil-C job to CI. Fil-C is a memory-safe implementation of C that checks every pointer access. It found two out-of-bounds reads that gcc, clang, and Valgrind missed. A new workflow also builds and tests on the CI runner with gcc and clang, with and without the optional libraries.

• Add fuzz testing for the JSON, Ini, and Pack readers. The readers are fuzzed with libFuzzer, AddressSanitizer, and UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer in CI. Fuzzing found several bugs in how invalid input is read, e.g. deeply nested JSON arrays in an info file or an object store response could overflow the memory context stack.

• Allow test user names that adduser on Debian rejects. The test container is built with the same user name as the host user. Debian's adduser rejects names that contain a dot, e.g. first.last, so the container build failed on Debian-based images for these users.

Test Development

• Fix test builds with clang and without optional libraries.

• Improve the Python test harness.

• CI updates.

• Check that every code and test module is defined and covered.

• Improve unit and integration tests.

v2.59.3 — Weak Encryption Subkey Bug

Released: 2026-10-04

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix possible checksum error loading encrypted info and manifest files. A large encrypted info or manifest file could lose its last lines when loaded, which failed the checksum. The lost lines had to fit in the final cipher block, so this is unlikely in practice.

• Fix possible weak encryption subkeys/salts. When OpenSSL could not get random data from the operating system the failure was ignored, and subkeys and salts were generated from memory that was not random. An error is now reported.

v2.59.2 — PostgreSQL 19beta4 Support

Released: 2026-09-27

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix empty block map when file is truncated to zero during backup. A block incremental file larger than repo-bundle-limit and truncated to zero by PostgreSQL during a backup was stored as a block map with no blocks. Every later backup that referenced the file failed with "unexpected eof" until the next full backup.

• Disable read retry when filters are passed to the driver. A retried read from a repository on an object store, accessed through a repository host, crashed. These reads are no longer retried by the client. The repository host still retries its read from the object store.

• Fix pagination of S3 version listing. Reading a repository at a target time with repo-target-time failed with "unable to find child 'NextContinuationToken'" when more than a thousand versions were listed under a prefix.

• Set the Azure version header for SAS authentication. Batch deletes require the version header, so with SAS authentication every batch was rejected. The rejection looked like a single failed file, and the rest of each batch was not deleted while expire reported success, leaving expired backups and WAL in the repository.

• Fix async archive-push stalling on a zero-size backup history file. A zero-size backup history file, e.g. in a cluster copied from a storage snapshot, failed every asynchronous archive-push run, so no WAL was archived. archive-push-batch-size is now converted to a segment count using the size of the first ready WAL segment.

• Fix annotate command on a remote encrypted repository. When the repository was encrypted and the cipher was configured only on the repository host, annotate failed to load backup.info.

Core Features

• PostgreSQL 19beta4/rc1 support. PostgreSQL 19beta4 reverted online page checksum changes, so the page checksum version is again limited to 0 and 1. It also changed the pg_control version and the WAL page magic number.

v2.59.1 — PostgreSQL 19beta3 Support

Released: 2026-08-17

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix hang when the chunk buffer is smaller than the input buffer. A multi-part upload to S3, GCS, or Azure could loop forever when the chunk buffer was smaller than the input buffer, e.g. after the chunk size grew during the upload. The chunk buffer is now always large enough to hold the input buffer.

• Compare a new backup label only against its own full backup set. Some object stores keep listing a prefix after everything under it has been deleted, e.g. MinIO with object locking or SeaweedFS, so a full backup that was removed could still appear in the repository. Every diff and incr backup after it then failed with "new backup label ... is not later than latest backup label ...". A new label is now compared only against the backups in its own full backup set.

• Fix source archives generated by GitHub missing files required to build. The source archives GitHub generates for a release were missing the code generation tooling and the files it reads, so they could not be built. Only the distribution tarball is trimmed now.

Core Features

• PostgreSQL 19beta3 support. PostgreSQL 19beta3 changed the WAL page magic number.

Documentation Improvements

• Document exception for dots in S3 bucket names when repo-s3-uri-style=path. With repo-s3-uri-style=path the bucket is part of the path instead of the host name, so dots in the bucket name do not cause a certificate host name mismatch.

• Remove explicit hot_standby configuration from user guide. hot_standby has been enabled by default since PostgreSQL 10. The quickstart now notes that a standby does not accept read-only connections without it.

Documentation Development

• Fix broken release link in news.xml.

v2.59.0 — PostgreSQL 19beta2 Support

Released: 2026-07-20

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix expire removing a backup in progress on another host. A backup is not added to backup.info until it completes, so when expire ran on one host while a backup was running on another, e.g. expire on a standby while the primary is backed up, the backup in progress was removed. Expiration no longer removes the latest backup when it is in progress or resumable.

• Fix archive-push-queue-max not enforced when a WAL file errors. In asynchronous mode the queue was measured against the WAL yet to be pushed. When a WAL file errored repeatedly the WAL files after it were pushed and no longer counted, although they stayed in pg_wal, so the queue limit was never reached and pg_wal could fill the disk. The queue is now measured against all the WAL PostgreSQL is waiting to archive, as in synchronous mode.

• Fix async archive-get failure during recovery across a timeline switch. Two async processes could race for the archive lock, and the one that lost exited before fetching the segment it was started for. The archive-get that started it then waited for archive-timeout and returned an error for a segment that exists, which could end recovery early, especially across a timeline switch. The segment is now fetched directly when the async process that should fetch it is not running.

• Fix potential buffer overrun in error module. A stack trace too long for its buffer was not terminated and could be read past the end of the buffer, and an error message too long for its buffer could write past the end of it when a system error was appended. Both require an unusually long message.

• Fix use-after-free of parallel protocol client. A client that ran out of work was freed but left in the client list and freed again on a later call. With debug or trace logging this read freed memory and could crash, e.g. a parallel backup with log-level-file=trace.

• Fix heap overflow when a pg option is set without pg1. When pg options were set for other indexes without pg1-path, e.g. pg2-path and pg3-path, the index map was overwritten. This corrupted the heap on musl, e.g. Alpine, and caused a segmentation fault. The highest numbered pg-path was also dropped.

• Fix crash when a signal arrives during exit on musl 1.2.6. musl 1.2.6, e.g. on Alpine 3.24, crashes when exit() is called while an exit is already in progress. This happened when a signal arrived during exit, e.g. when the server command terminated a child process that was already exiting. A signal that arrives during exit is now ignored.

Core Features

• PostgreSQL 19beta1/beta2 support. Adds support for PostgreSQL 19beta1/beta2. PostgreSQL 19 can enable and disable page checksums online, and page checksums are not validated while either is in progress.

• Add archive-expire-before option to clean up WAL archive. The expire option archive-expire-before removes WAL before a given segment from the archive but never WAL that a retained backup requires. It can clean up the archive from the restartpoint of a standby with archive_cleanup_command instead of pg_archivecleanup, which does not know about retention.

• Add batch delete for Azure storage. Files are removed with the Azure Blob Batch API, up to 256 per request, instead of one request per file. This speeds up expire and other commands that remove files from the repository.

• Add support for S3 Outposts. Set repo-s3-service=s3-outposts when using an S3 Outposts endpoint. The option sets the service name used for request signing and defaults to s3.

• Add S3 process authentication. Set repo-s3-key-type=process and set repo-s3-process-cmd to a command that outputs temporary credentials in the JSON format of the AWS process credential provider. The credentials are refreshed before they expire.

• Provide a distribution tarball with generated code and documentation. The tarball includes the generated code and the rendered man page and HTML documentation, so it builds and installs without the code generation and documentation tooling, including libyaml.

Core Improvements

• Reconnect SFTP storage after the server drops an idle connection. SFTP servers and firewalls may drop a connection that has been idle for a while, e.g. the repository read connection during the copy phase of a backup, and the next use failed with a socket error. A dropped connection is now reopened and the operation is retried once.

• Add user/group caching for faster manifest build. When user and group names are looked up through a remote name service, e.g. sssd or LDAP, each lookup is a round trip, which dominated the manifest build for clusters with millions of files. User and group names are now cached.

• Add per-repo backup progress to info command output. When backups run on more than one repository at once, the info command now reports progress for each repository as well as overall progress. The JSON output has a repo array for each backup lock.

• Add backup.info checks to verify command. The verify command now warns when a backup in the repository is not in backup.info and when a backup in backup.info is missing from the repository. A missing backup is reported as having a missing manifest.

• Allow the S3 STS endpoint to be configured. Set repo-s3-sts-host to use a regional STS endpoint with repo-s3-key-type=web-id, e.g. sts.eu-central-2.amazonaws.com. AWS opt-in regions do not accept credentials from the global endpoint, which is still the default.

• Add archive-push-batch-size to limit WAL pushed per asynchronous run. In asynchronous mode archive-push-queue-max is only checked at the start of a run, so a run working through a large backlog could let the queue grow well past the limit. archive-push-batch-size (default 16GiB) limits the WAL pushed per run, so the queue is checked again sooner.

• Exit async archive-push on first error. When the repository was unavailable the async process kept trying every ready WAL segment, so a run could take long enough for pg_wal to fill before archive-push-queue-max was checked again. The run now exits on the first error, after the jobs in progress finish.

• Harden HTTP chunked response parsing. Chunk extensions and trailers are now accepted, transfer-encoding is compared without regard to case, and a response with both transfer-encoding and content-length is rejected.

• Error when running as root unless allow-root is enabled. Running a command other than restore as root could create files in the repository, e.g. backup.info, that the PostgreSQL user cannot access. allow-root is disabled by default for every command except restore, and the check also applies on remote hosts.

• Fewer binary searches when building manifest. The manifest build for a diff or incr backup searched the prior manifest three times for each file. It now searches once, which saves millions of searches for clusters with millions of files.

• Improve seek performance during block incremental delta restore. A seek and a flush of the write buffer were done for every block written during a block incremental delta restore, and blocks are often 8KiB. The file position is now tracked and the seek and flush are only done when needed.

• Bundle backup files in order rather than scanning for a better fit. A file that would push a bundle over repo-bundle-size was skipped for a smaller file later in the queue. Files are now added in order and a bundle is closed once it reaches repo-bundle-size, so a bundle may exceed it by up to repo-bundle-limit.

• Report the underlying error when a query fails to complete. When the connection was lost after the first result of a query was delivered, e.g. under load, the error was the generic "NULL result required to complete request". The error from PostgreSQL is now reported, with hints about a lost connection and about aggressive idle_session_timeout and idle_in_transaction_session_timeout settings.

• Report the actual error when an S3 credential request fails. An error from AWS for a web-id or pod-id credential request was reported as a failure to parse the response. The error returned by AWS is now reported, and the tokens are redacted when the request is logged.

• Report archive-push spool path errors to the PostgreSQL log. When the async spool path could not be created, e.g. permission was denied, the error could not be written to the spool and archive-push failed with a generic timeout that pointed at the async log. The spool path is now created before the async process starts, so the error appears in the PostgreSQL log.

• Hint that pgBackRest may be out of date when a version is unsupported. When pgBackRest does not recognize a PostgreSQL version, e.g. an older pgBackRest on the restore host reading a backup of a newer cluster, the error now hints that pgBackRest may need to be updated on all hosts. The version is reported in user-facing form, e.g. 13 rather than 130000.

• Add systemd notify integration. When built with libsystemd, the server command notifies systemd when it is ready to accept connections and when it is stopping, as PostgreSQL and PgBouncer do.

• Suppress unused parameter errors in meson compiler probes. The meson compiler probes declared main() parameters they did not use, which failed the probes when unused parameter warnings were errors.

• C11 is now the minimum C standard.

Core Development

• Refactor restore module into included modules.

• Update LICENSE.txt and PostgreSQL copyright for 2026.

• Enhance StringId with optional sequence information.

• Refactor the storage read and write interfaces.

• Improve error handling in the SFTP storage driver.

• Refactor the manifest module into included modules.

• Reverse sort order in backup and restore comparators.

• Free memory sooner in restoreFile().

• Move archiveAsyncExec() to command/command module and rename.

• Ban unsafe string functions and limit an oversized log message.

• Improve code generation for the configuration and help.

• Improve compiler compatibility and build checks.

• Clean up code and comments.

Documentation Improvements

• Make stanza option internal for the repo-* commands. The stanza option only has an effect on the repo-* commands with undocumented storage path constants, so the documentation implied it did something it does not. The option is no longer documented for these commands and works as before.

• Document that info reads encryption settings from global section. When run without stanza the info command reads encryption settings only from the global section, so encryption settings configured for a stanza require stanza.

• Document that expire-auto uses the backup command configuration. Automatic expiration after a backup uses the configuration of the backup command, so options set only for the expire command are not applied. Disable expire-auto and run expire separately when it needs its own configuration.

• Document adjusting the logrotate su directive for a dedicated user. Packages may install a logrotate configuration that rotates the logs as the postgres user. When a dedicated user owns the repository and logs, the su directive must be changed to that user or rotation fails with a permission error.

• Document that end-of-line comments are not supported in config files. End-of-line comments have never been supported, although they may appear to work for some options. Only comments on a line of their own are supported.

Documentation Development

• Add the news page and sponsors to the website.

• Update and correct the documentation.

• Improve the documentation build.

• Replace Minio with Ceph for S3 documentation and testing.

Test Improvements

• Fix Alpine group conflicts in CI containers. Group entries with members are now handled when the test group is renamed, and the Alpine group is only created when it does not already exist.

Test Development

• CI updates.

• Add a smoke test to verify a build against installed PostgreSQL.

• Improve the test harness.

• Improve unit tests.

v2.58.0 — Object Storage Improvements

Released: 2026-01-19

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix deadlock due to logging in signal handler. A signal that arrived while a lock was held by gmtime_r(), e.g. the SIGTERM sent by stop with --force, could deadlock when the signal handler logged. The signal handler now logs with only async-signal-safe functions.

Core Features

• HTTP support for S3, GCS, and Azure. An object store endpoint can now begin with http:// to connect without TLS. HTTPS is still used when the endpoint does not specify a protocol.

• Allow expiration of oldest full backup regardless of current retention. The expire option --oldest expires the oldest full backup and the backups that depend on it regardless of the retention settings, e.g. when the repository is running out of space. WAL before the oldest remaining full backup is expired as well.

• Support for Azure managed identities. Set repo-azure-key-type=auto to fetch credentials automatically using managed identities instead of configuring them. The credentials are refreshed before they expire.

• Experimental support for S3 EKS pod identity. Set repo-s3-key-type=pod-id to fetch credentials automatically using EKS pod identity instead of configuring them. The credentials are refreshed before they expire.

• Allow configuration of TLS cipher suites. Set tls-cipher-12 for TLS 1.2 and tls-cipher-13 for TLS 1.3, e.g. for compliance. The cipher suites apply to every connection a process makes.

• Allow process priority to be set. priority sets the scheduling priority of pgBackRest processes from -20 to 19, as with nice. A higher value makes pgBackRest less likely to interfere with PostgreSQL.

Core Improvements

• Allow dots in S3 bucket names when using path-style URIs. Dots in a bucket name only cause a certificate host name mismatch with host-style URIs, so they are now allowed with repo-s3-uri-style=path, which most self-hosted S3 services use.

• Require TLS >= 1.2 unless verification is disabled. TLS 1.0 and 1.1 have been deprecated since 2021. Verification is always enabled for connections between pgBackRest hosts. When verification is disabled for an object store with repo-storage-verify-tls, e.g. for a self-signed certificate, every protocol version is allowed.

• Dynamically size S3/GCS/Azure chunks for large uploads. The number of chunks in an upload is limited, so with the default repo-storage-upload-chunk-size the largest file that could be uploaded was 50GiB to S3, 40GiB to GCS, and 200GiB to Azure. The chunk size now grows during an upload, so files up to 5TiB can be uploaded to S3 and GCS and up to 45TiB to Azure.

• Optimize S3/GCS/Azure chunk size for small files. The whole chunk buffer was allocated when a file was opened, although many files are smaller than a chunk. The buffer now grows as data arrives, which saves memory when small files are uploaded.

• Remove support for PostgreSQL 9.5. PostgreSQL 9.5 is no longer supported, per the policy of supporting five end-of-life versions of PostgreSQL.

• Improve logging of default for options with an unresolved dependency. An option set in the configuration file was logged at the start of a command when its dependency was not resolved, although its default value was used. The option is no longer logged in this case.

Core Development

• Simplify the versioned PostgreSQL types.

• Use get_option() for tasks supported by the new meson version.

• Simplify the option definitions in config.yaml.

• Use JsonRead for all info JSON parsing.

• Refactor StringId and option parsing.

• Fix logging, formatting, and comments.

Documentation Improvements

• Remove explicit max_wal_senders/wal_level configuration from user guide. max_wal_senders and wal_level have defaulted to the values the user guide requires since PostgreSQL 10.

• Clarify that bundling is useful for filesystems with large block sizes. Bundling saves space on filesystems with large block sizes, where each small file takes a whole block.

Documentation Development

• Improve the documentation build.

• Improve wording in the user guide.

Test Development

• Fix WAL segment numbering in command/expire unit test.

• CI updates.

v2.57.0 — Suppress Repository Symlinks

Released: 2025-10-18

Core Bug Fixes

• Unnest HTTP/TLS/socket timeouts. A failed socket connection was also retried by the TLS and HTTP layers, so with the default io-timeout of 60 seconds a connection took nine minutes to time out. Each layer now retries only its own failures.

• Fix possible segfault in page checksum error message. The error message for invalid page checksums used a string that was out of scope, which could log garbage or crash. This was most likely with pg_tde, since every encrypted file fails the page checksum.

• Fix possible segfault in backup resume messages. The message that reports why a backup cannot be resumed used a string that was out of scope, which could log garbage or crash.

Core Features

• Add repo-symlink option to suppress creation of repository symlinks. Some filesystems that are otherwise Posix-compatible do not support symlinks. Set repo-symlink=n to keep the latest and tablespace symlinks from being created in the repository.

Core Improvements

• Add HTTP retries for 408 and 429 errors. HTTP 408 (Request Timeout) and 429 (Too Many Requests) errors are now retried. 429 errors are common on Cloudflare R2.

Core Development

• Finalize catalog number for PostgreSQL 18 release.

• Remove unused code and fix comments.

Documentation Development

• Update user guide and tests to Ubuntu 22.04.

Test Development

• CI updates.

• Clean up unit tests.

v2.56.0 — Progress Info Improvements

Released: 2025-07-21

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix issue with adhoc expiration when no backups in a repository. Adhoc expiration failed with "cannot get index 0 from list with 0 value(s)" when a repository had no backups.

Core Features

• Add restore progress to info command output. The restore command now records its progress, which the info command reports alongside backup progress. A restore is also no longer terminated by the stop command.

• Add progress-only detail level for info command output. Set --detail-level=progress to report only progress, which is faster because the repository is not read. The default is full.

Core Improvements

• Retry failed reads on object stores. A read from an object store that failed after it started was fatal, which could restart an expensive job, e.g. during restore. A failed read is now retried from where it left off.

• Fix defaults in command-line help. When an option has more than one default, e.g. repo-storage-upload-chunk-size with an S3 and an Azure repository, the option list shows <multi> and the help for the option lists each default. Defaults are not shown for options that are not valid in the current configuration.

Core Development

• Improve the predictability of floating point numbers formatted as strings.

• Improve option defaults and dependencies.

• Clean up code.

Documentation Improvements

• Describe discrete option values in a list where appropriate. The values of options such as output for the verify and version commands are now described as a list, as for other options.

• Fix "less than" in help output for archive-mode option.

Documentation Development

• Update the contributing, release, and support documentation.

Test Development

• CI updates.

• Improve unit tests.

v2.55.1 — Bug Fixes

Released: 2025-05-05

Core Bug Fixes

• Revert "calculate content-md5 on S3 only when required". S3 requires either content-md5 or an x-amz-content-* checksum for uploads when object lock is enabled, and Scality did not accept the alternate checksums, so uploads failed. content-md5 is calculated for all requests with content again.

• Fix lower bounds checking for option keys. An indexed option with a key of 0, e.g. pg0-path, caused a segfault. It is now an error.

Documentation Development

• Add details about notifying packagers to release instructions.

v2.55.0 — Verification Improvements and PostgreSQL 18 Support

Released: 2025-04-21

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix block incremental restore issue on non-default repository. When the backup being restored used block incremental and was not in the lowest numbered repository, the restore read part of the block incremental data from the lowest numbered repository. Setting repo worked around the problem.

• Do not set recovery_target_timeline=current for PostgreSQL < 12. Before PostgreSQL 12, explicitly setting recovery_target_timeline to current behaves as latest, although current is the default. The setting is now left out of recovery.conf when it is set to current for these versions.

• Fix expire archive range logging. Only the last archive path removed was logged as the start of the range, so the log suggested that far fewer files were expired than were.

• Fix error reporting for queries with no results. An error from a query that expected no results was reported as an unexpected result instead of as the error.

Core Features

• Verify recovery target timeline. A backup that cannot follow the target timeline, e.g. one made after a standby was promoted and the new timeline forked off, failed only when recovery started, with a PostgreSQL error that is hard to interpret. The timeline is now checked against the history files before the restore starts.

• Allow verification of a specified backup. The verify option --set verifies only the specified backup and the WAL required to make it consistent.

• Add support for S3/GCS requester pays. Set repo-s3-requester-pays or repo-gcs-user-project to bill the requester instead of the bucket owner, e.g. so a hosted service can give customers access to their backups.

• PostgreSQL 18 support. This release was made before PostgreSQL 18 had a beta, so support was initially experimental. Nothing that affects pgBackRest changed before PostgreSQL 18.0.

• Allow connections to PostgreSQL on abstract domain sockets. pg-socket-path no longer has to be an absolute path, so it can name an abstract domain socket. libpq reports a path that is not valid.

• Add numeric output to version command. Set --output=num to output the version as a number, e.g. 2055000, which is easier to compare.

Core Improvements

• Allow backup command to operate on remote repositories. The backup command can now run on a host where the repository is remote, which allows more flexibility in where backups are run.

• Use lz4 for protocol compression. lz4 compresses much faster than gz and gives similar ratios at the low levels used for protocol compression. Setting compress-level-network=0 no longer disables protocol compression.

• Calculate content-md5 on S3 only when required. The content-md5 header is only calculated for batch delete requests, which require it, to save CPU when files are uploaded. This change was reverted in v2.55.1.

• Warn when a value for a multi-key option is overwritten. Options with key/value pairs, e.g. recovery-option, silently overwrote a value when its key was specified again. A warning is now logged.

• Add detail logging for expired archive path. Removing a large number of archive files could look like a hang. A message at detail level now shows progress.

• Remove support for PostgreSQL 9.4. PostgreSQL 9.4 is no longer supported, per the policy of supporting five end-of-life versions of PostgreSQL. Backups of 9.4 clusters can still be expired.

• Remove autoconf/make build. v2.54.0 was the last release to support the autoconf/make build. Use meson to build.

Core Development

• Revert "full/incremental backup method."

• Improve hex encode performance with bytewise lookup.

• Fix missing return in FUNCTION_LOG_RETURN_VOID().

• Remove extraneous const from cvtIntToZ() prototype.

• Enable additional compiler warnings.

• Improve logging macros and their coverage.

• Allow negative values for integer options.

• Refactor the compression and protocol modules.

• Update LICENSE.txt and PostgreSQL copyright for 2025.

• Separate version into component parts.

• Add StringId linter.

• Refactor code to satisfy Coverity.

• Fix typos.

• Clean up code.

Documentation Improvements

• Fix documentation for specifying multiple stanzas with tls-server-auth. Multiple stanzas are specified for tls-server-auth as a comma-separated list. The documentation said to repeat the option.

• Clarify incremental backup expiration. The documentation implied that incremental backups are expired by count. It now explains how incremental backups are expired and that full backups count as differential backups for differential retention.

• Clarify requirement for local/remote pgBackRest versions to match.

• Add FAQ about exporting self-contained cluster. The FAQ explains how to create a self-contained export of a cluster with a backup made with --archive-copy and restored with --type=none.

• Caveat --tablespace-map-all regarding tablespace creation. A tablespace created after the backup starts is not in the manifest, so tablespace-map-all cannot map it.

• Clarify behavior of --repo-retention-full-type.

• Change --process-max recommendation for object stores to --repo-bundle. On object stores repo-bundle reduces the time spent creating files far more than process-max does, because fewer files are created.

• Update unix_socket_directory to unix_socket_directories. unix_socket_directory has not been valid since PostgreSQL 9.2, so only unix_socket_directories is documented.

• Recommend not placing spool-path within pg_xlog/pg_wal. A spool path inside pg_xlog or pg_wal can cause problems for PostgreSQL tools such as pg_rewind.

Documentation Development

• Fix instances of "of of".

• Update and correct the documentation.

Test Development

• Fix tests, logging, and comments in unit tests.

• CI updates.

• Improve the integration and unit tests.

v2.54.2 — Bug Fix

Released: 2025-01-20

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix issue after disabling bundling with block incremental enabled. When bundling was disabled after backups were made with bundling and block incremental enabled, the prior backups could not be read. The setting needed to read them is now preserved.

Core Development

• Update LICENSE.txt and PostgreSQL copyright for 2025.

Documentation Improvements

• Clarify behavior of multiple configuration files. Each configuration file must be valid on its own, so a section must be specified in each file that sets an option in it. The documentation also notes that quoting is not supported, whitespace is trimmed from keys and values, and repeated sections are merged.

Documentation Development

• Clarify that unhandled errors may occur in edge cases.

Test Development

• Update CI and integration tests.

v2.54.1 — Bug Fix

Released: 2024-12-16

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix issue with version/help commands attempting to load pgbackrest.conf. In v2.54.0 the version and help commands loaded pgbackrest.conf and failed when it could not be read or parsed.

Core Development

• Exclude logging macros from coverage reporting and fix volatile qualifiers.

Documentation Development

• Update documentation and release notes.

Test Improvements

• Stabilize async archiving in integration tests. An async archive-get left running by one integration test could write an error to the queue of the next test and fail its recovery.

Test Development

• Update CI and integration tests.

v2.54.0 — Target Time for Versioned Storage

Released: 2024-10-21

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix PostgreSQL query performance for large datasets. The query timeout logic delayed reading query results, which could make a query that returned a large result take up to db-timeout. Results are now read as soon as they are available.

Core Features

• Allow repositories on versioned storage to be read at a target time. The archive-get, info, repo-get, repo-ls, restore, and verify commands can read a repository on versioned Azure, GCS, or S3 storage as it was at repo-target-time. This allows recovery even when the repository has been deleted or corrupted, accidentally or maliciously.

• Allow requested standby backup to proceed with no standby. Set backup-standby=prefer to back up from a standby when one is available and from the primary otherwise. This does not help when the standby responds but fails to sync with the primary after the backup starts.

Core Improvements

• Summarize backup reference list for info command text output. The backup reference list can be very long, so the text output of the info command now summarizes it. The full list is shown when --set is specified.

• Refresh web-id token for each S3 authentication. The token file named by AWS_WEB_IDENTITY_TOKEN_FILE was read once at startup, so the token could expire during a long operation. The token is now read for each authentication.

• Correctly display current values for indexed options in help. The current value shown for an indexed option was always the value for the first index, e.g. pg1-path. The option help now lists the value for each index, and the option list shows <multi> when there is more than one.

• Save backup.info only when contents have changed. expire saved backup.info even when it had not changed. Fewer saves also make it easier to choose a target time on versioned storage.

• Remove limitation on reading files in parallel during restore. The protocol could only read or write one file at a time on a remote, so a restore read one file at a time from the repository. Protocol commands can now be multiplexed, so a restore can read more than one file at a time, e.g. a bundle and the block incremental data for a file in it.

• Improve SFTP error messages. SFTP errors were reported as numbers only. They now include a description of the error.

Core Development

• Refactor config parsing and the help and version commands.

• Refactor the storage and protocol modules.

• Finalize catalog number for PostgreSQL 17 release.

• Retry socket bind.

Documentation Features

• Add performance tuning section to user guide. The options that commonly improve performance were spread through the documentation. The quickstart now has a section that lists them.

Documentation Improvements

• Clarify source for data_directory. pg-path should match the data_directory reported by PostgreSQL, which may differ from the value in postgresql.conf.

• Better logic for deciding when a summary should be lower-cased. Summaries that start with a proper name or an acronym, e.g. PostgreSQL, are no longer lower-cased in the documentation.

Documentation Development

• Update documentation.

• Improve documentation build.

Test Development

• Improve test harness and unit tests.

• CI updates.

v2.53.1 — PostgreSQL 17 Support

Released: 2024-08-19

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix permissions when restore run as root user. When restore was run as root, pg_control was owned by root. A restore as root also failed when the base path did not exist.

• Fix segfault on delayed connection errors. A connection error that was delayed long enough to be reported on a later wait could cause a segfault.

• Skip local repository duplicate check for SFTP. The check for local repositories that are configured more than once was also applied to SFTP repositories, which are never local.

Core Improvements

• PostgreSQL 17 support. PostgreSQL 17beta3 changed the control and WAL formats, which is unusual for a beta.

Core Development

• Do not allow help for command roles other than main.

Documentation Development

• Fix typo in user guide.

v2.53 — Concurrent Backups

Released: 2024-07-22

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix SFTP renaming failure when file already exists. Some SFTP servers report that a file already exists with an error that was not handled, so renaming a file over an existing file failed.

Core Features

• Allow backups to run concurrently on different repositories. Backups of the same stanza can now run at the same time on different repositories, since locks are now per stanza and repository instead of per stanza. This is not possible for PostgreSQL <= 9.5.

• Support IP-based SANs for TLS certificate validation. Certificates with an IP address as the subject alternative name, e.g. IP:1.2.3.4, are now validated. IPv4 and IPv6 addresses must match exactly.

Core Improvements

• Default log-level-stderr option to off. Warnings and errors written to stderr were often lost when only stdout was redirected while collecting logs. An explicitly set log-level-stderr is not affected.

• Allow alternative WAL segment sizes for PostgreSQL ≤ 10. PostgreSQL <= 10 can be built with a different WAL segment size, and forks such as Greenplum set it with initdb.

• Add hint to check SFTP authorization log. When SFTP authentication fails the error now hints that the authorization log on the server may have more detail.

• Display time option defaults and allowed values with appropriate units. Time option defaults and allowed values were shown in seconds, which was hard to read for large values. Fractional seconds are no longer allowed, so a value such as archive-timeout=0.5 must be written as archive-timeout=500ms.

• Require OpenSSL >= 1.1.1.

Core Development

• Require the lz4 library and compiler builtins in the meson build.

• Improve option units, defaults, and error messages.

• Improve option and command parsing.

• Improve reading lock files in the info and stop commands.

• Refactor the backup and manifest code.

• Fix formatting.

Documentation Improvements

• Clarify archive-push multi-repo behavior. When one repository is failing, archive-push cannot push ahead to the other repositories unless archive-async is enabled.

Documentation Development

• Update the contributing documentation and the documentation and test tools.

Test Development

• Migrate coverage testing to C and remove dependency on lcov.

• CI updates.

v2.52.1 — Bug Fix

Released: 2024-06-25

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix issue with files larger on the replica than on the primary. With block incremental, when a file was a different size on the primary than on the standby during a backup from standby, the next diff or incr backup stored the size from the primary. The backup after that failed with "repo size must be > 0".

v2.52 — PostgreSQL 17beta1 Support

Released: 2024-05-27

Core Features

• Add GCS batch delete support. Files are removed with batch requests instead of one request per file, which speeds up expire and other commands that remove files from the repository.

• S3 SSE-C encryption support. Set repo-s3-sse-customer-key to have S3 encrypt the data with the provided key after it is transmitted. This is not as secure as encrypting the data before it is transmitted with repo-cipher-type.

• PostgreSQL 17beta1 support. Adds the catalog version and WAL magic number for PostgreSQL 17.

Core Improvements

• Allow explicit disabling of optional dependencies in meson builds. An optional feature can be disabled in the meson build even when its library is installed, as some platforms require, e.g. FreeBSD. By default a feature is enabled when its library is found.

• Dynamically find python in meson build. The meson build now finds the python installation instead of requiring a python3 binary on the path, e.g. when only python3.9 is installed. The minimum meson version is now 0.47.

• Tag pgbackrest build target in meson as installable.

Core Development

• Update Fedora test image to Fedora 38.

• Update modules to recent coding standards.

• Silence Coverity complaints.

• Clean up code and comments.

Documentation Improvements

• Update start/stop documentation to reflect actual functionality.

Documentation Development

• Update the contributors, release notes, and metrics report.

Test Development

• Improve unit tests.

• CI updates.

v2.51 — Meson Build System

Released: 2024-03-25

Core Bug Fixes

• Skip zero-length files for block incremental delta restore. An existing zero-length file caused a block incremental delta restore to fail in the block checksum filter. These files are now skipped, since there is nothing in them to reuse.

• Fix performance regression in storage list. Listing a path requested detailed information for each file, which could be slow, e.g. on object stores. Only the information the list needs is now requested.

• Fix progress logging when file size changes during backup.

Core Improvements

• Improved support for dual stack connections. When a host name resolves to more than one address, e.g. IPv4 and IPv6, the next address is tried once the prior address has had reasonable time to connect, following the "happy eyeballs" approach of RFC 8305. A connection attempt that neither fails nor connects no longer uses up all the available time.

• Make meson the primary build system. meson is now the build system used for testing and for building the documentation. Functions not used outside their module are now hidden, which makes the binary smaller.

• Detect files that have not changed during non-delta incremental backup. During a non-delta diff or incr backup, a file that fits in a single buffer, or any block incremental file, is compared to the file in the prior backup and referenced instead of stored when it has not changed.

• Prevent invalid recovery when backup_label removed. When backup_label is removed from a restored cluster, PostgreSQL uses the checkpoint in pg_control for crash recovery, which nearly always corrupts the cluster. Restore now invalidates the checkpoint in pg_control, so recovery fails instead. pg_controldata shows the checkpoint as 0/DEAD.

• Improve archive-push WAL segment queue handling. The size of every WAL segment in the queue was read to measure the queue. The size of the first segment is now used for all of them.

• Limit resume functionality to full backups. Resume did not work correctly for delta diff and incr backups, and a file that changed since the prior backup is likely to change again before a resume. Only full backups are resumed now.

• Update resume functionality for block incremental. Resume removed block incremental files, so it worked but copied all of them again. Block incremental files are now kept on resume.

• Allow --version and --help for version and help. --version and --help now work as they do for most programs. Use help for help on a specific command or option.

• Add detailed backtrace to autoconf/make build. Error stack traces in the autoconf/make build now include detail from libbacktrace, which performance tests showed has no noticeable cost.

Core Development

• Improve sort comparators.

• Fix help not displaying help for the help command.

• Update config.guess and config.sub to latest versions.

• Improve asserts.

• Validate more fields in pg_control.

• Redact secure options in check --report.

Documentation Improvements

• Update references to recovery.conf. References to recovery.conf now include postgresql.auto.conf, which newer versions of PostgreSQL use.

Documentation Development

• Migrate man page generation to C.

• Add release instructions to update PostgreSQL ecosystem wiki.

Test Development

• Migrate integration tests to C.

• Improve unit tests and test tools.

• CI updates.

v2.50 — Performance Improvements and Bug Fixes

Released: 2024-01-22

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix short read in block incremental restore. A compressed super block can end with bytes that are not needed to decompress it but mark the end of the data. Depending on how a buffer lined up with the data, these bytes were not read and the restore failed.

• Fix overflow suppressing backup progress in info output. The sizes in the lock file were read as 32-bit values, so the info command did not report progress for a backup larger than 4GiB.

Core Improvements

• Preserve partial files during block incremental delta restore. A file smaller than expected was not kept for a block incremental delta restore, although its blocks can be reused, e.g. when retrying a restore that failed or restoring over a smaller file.

• Add support for alternate compile-time page sizes. PostgreSQL can be built with a different page size, e.g. 4096, and forks such as Greenplum do this.

• Skip files truncated during backup when bundling. A file truncated to zero after the files were assigned to bundles was still stored in its bundle, and a debug build failed an assertion. These files are now skipped.

• Improve SFTP storage error messages.

Core Development

• Refactor backup incremental manifest generation.

• Refactor backup and retry code.

• Improve logging of file size changes and resume warnings during backup.

• Fix comments.

• Update LICENSE.txt and PostgreSQL copyright for 2024.

Test Development

• Improve unit tests.

• CI updates.

v2.49 — Remove PostgreSQL 9.3 Support

Released: 2023-11-27

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix regression in retries. v2.48 dropped the retry that was made when an operation used up its whole timeout, so a timeout became an error, e.g. waiting for a socket to be writable on an object store. Two retries are now made even when the timeout has expired.

• Fix recursive path remove in SFTP storage driver. Some SFTP servers report permission denied instead of a failure when a directory is unlinked as a file, so removing a path recursively failed on those servers.

Core Improvements

• Remove support for PostgreSQL 9.3. PostgreSQL 9.3 is no longer supported, per the policy of supporting five end-of-life versions of PostgreSQL.

Core Development

• Fix storageReadRemote() to return actual read bytes.

• Update config.guess and config.sub to latest versions.

• Clean up code.

Documentation Features

• Document maintainer options. Maintainer options are now documented in their own section with the caveats for using them, and pg-version-force is no longer internal.

• Update point-in-time recovery documentation for PostgreSQL >= 13. Since PostgreSQL 13 recovery errors when the recovery target is not reached. The point-in-time recovery section now works for PostgreSQL 13 and later as well as for earlier versions.

Documentation Development

• Build command and configuration reference in C.

• Update the site introduction and the user guide.

• Update Minio test/documentation container version.

Test Improvements

• Allow config/load unit test to run without libssh2 installed.

Test Development

• Remove unused fields from backupJobResult() test in command/backup unit.

• Improve unit tests.

• Add test to show behavior of bundled files truncated during backup.

v2.48 — Repository Storage Tags

Released: 2023-09-25

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix issue restoring block incremental without a block list. A block map with no blocks, which is written when a file timestamp changes but the file does not, was not decrypted when it followed a file stored without block incremental in the same bundle read. With enough affected files the retries were exhausted and the restore failed.

Core Features

• Add --repo-storage-tag option to create object tags. Set repo-storage-tag to add tags to the objects written to an S3, GCS, or Azure repository. Tags are set for each repository.

• Add known hosts checking for SFTP storage driver. SFTP host keys are now checked against the known hosts files by default, i.e. repo-sftp-host-key-check-type=strict. Set repo-sftp-host-key-check-type=accept-new to add new hosts automatically, or repo-sftp-host-key-check-type=none to skip the check as before.

• Support for dual stack connections. Each address a host name resolves to is now tried in turn, e.g. an IPv6 address with no route to the host and then an IPv4 address, until one connects or the timeout expires. Repeated retry errors are also summarized in error messages.

• Add backup size completed/total to info command JSON output. The JSON output of the info command now includes the completed and total size of a backup in progress, so progress can be monitored by other programs.

Core Improvements

• Multi-stanza check command. When stanza is not specified, the check command now checks every stanza in the configuration.

• Retry reads of pg_control until checksum is valid. On some filesystems, e.g. ext4, a read of pg_control during a concurrent write can return torn data. The read is now retried until the checksum is valid.

• Optimize WAL segment check after successful backup. The check for WAL segments after a backup listed the storage once for each segment. Each WAL directory is now listed once and the list is reused.

• Improve GCS multi-part performance. Chunks of a multi-part upload are now uploaded as soon as they are available.

• Allow archive-get command to run when stanza is stopped. The archive-get command does not write to the repository, so it can now run while the stanza is stopped, as restore can.

• Accept leading tilde in paths for SFTP public/private keys. Paths for repo-sftp-private-key-file and repo-sftp-public-key-file may now begin with ~, as documented.

• Reload GCS credentials before renewing authentication token. The service key file is now read again before the authentication token is renewed, so the key can be replaced while a command is running.

Core Development

• Add report option to check command.

• Update config.guess and config.sub to latest versions.

• Update xxHash to v0.8.2.

• Clean up code.

• Finalize catalog number for PostgreSQL 16 release.

• Add prefix to meson build target to avoid conflicts.

• Fix manifest command filter for files in a tablespace.

• Add block incremental info to restore detail logging.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fix configuration reference example for the tls-server-address option. The example ::* was not valid. Use * for IPv4 or :: for IPv6.

• Fix command reference example for the filter option.

Documentation Development

• Split release notes into individual files.

• Update help title for the --annotation option.

Test Improvements

• Allow storage/sftp unit test to run without libssh2 installed.

Test Development

• Improve unit tests.

• CI updates.

v2.47 — Performance Improvements and Bug Fixes

Released: 2023-07-24

Core Bug Fixes

• Preserve block incremental info in manifest during delta backup. When a file changed so that it would not use block incremental if it were new, e.g. it shrank below the block incremental limit or its timestamp moved far enough into the past, its block incremental info was lost from the manifest of a delta backup even though the file could still be referenced to the prior backup.

• Fix block incremental file names in verify command. The verify command used the compression extension instead of .pgbi for block incremental files stored outside a bundle, so it could not find them.

• Fix spurious automatic delta backup on backup from standby. File sizes on the standby can differ from the primary, e.g. for free space maps, so the next incremental backup could see a size change on the primary and switch to a checksum delta, which can take much longer. The original size is now kept in the manifest and used for the comparison.

• Skip recovery.signal for PostgreSQL >= 12 when recovery type=none. With type=none, recovery.signal is no longer written for PostgreSQL >= 12, which matches the behavior for earlier versions.

• Fix unique label generation for diff/incr backup. With at least two full backups and the latest expired, a diff or incr backup failed as if the clock had gone backward, because its label was compared with the label of the expired full backup.

• Fix time-based archive expiration when no backups are expired. When time-based retention was met but no backups were expired, archive was not expired and "time-based archive retention not met" was logged. One more backup was then needed to expire the earlier WAL.

Core Improvements

• Improve performance of SFTP storage driver. The SFTP storage driver waited for a fixed time when libssh2 could not continue. It now waits until the socket can be read or written.

• Add timezone offset to info command date/time output. Timestamps in the info command output now include the timezone offset, so they can be used directly as a recovery target, e.g. with --target.

• Centralize error handling for unsupported features. Errors for features that were not compiled in, e.g. lz4, are now more detailed and consistent. Specifying SFTP storage when it was not compiled in no longer fails an assertion.

Core Development

• Use new LibXML error handler.

• Fix missed memory auditing in FUNCTION_LOG_RETURN_VOID().

• Increase protocolServerError() logging to debug level.

• Log when file size changes during backup.

• Improve comments.

Documentation Improvements

• Clarify preference to install from packages in the user guide.

Documentation Development

• Update the user guide, feature list, and NEWS.md.

• Build u20 image to speed contributing document generation.

Test Development

• Improve unit tests.

• CI updates.

v2.46 — Block Incremental Backup and SFTP Storage

Released: 2023-05-22

Core Features

• Block incremental backup. Block incremental stores only the parts of a file that changed since the prior backup, which saves space and time in diff and incr backups of large files. Enable it with repo-block, which requires repo-bundle.

• SFTP support for repository storage. Set repo-type=sftp and repo-sftp-host to store the repository on an SFTP server.

• PostgreSQL 16 support. Adds the catalog version and WAL magic number for PostgreSQL 16.

Core Improvements

• Allow page header checks to be skipped. The page header checks made while verifying page checksums can report false errors for encrypted pages. Set page-header-check=n to skip them. They are enabled by default.

• Avoid chown() on recovery files during restore. Restore skipped chown() for restored files that already had the right owner but not for the recovery files it writes. The Posix driver now also skips chown() when the owner is already correct.

• Add error retry detail for HTTP retries. An error after HTTP retries now reports how many retries were made and for how long.

Core Development

• Improve internal manifest command.

• Improve object and allocation handling.

• Refactor the lock and configuration load modules.

• Sleep using nanosleep() instead of select().

• Autogenerate PostgreSQL versions.

• Update modules to recent coding standards.

• Remove double spaces and extraneous whitespace.

Documentation Improvements

• Add warning about using recovery type=none. Recovery type=none does not increment the timeline at the end of recovery, which can cause PostgreSQL to archive duplicate WAL that is rejected and fills the disk, and can make tools like pg_rewind fail or corrupt the cluster. The documentation now warns against it.

• Add note about running stanza-create on already-created repositories. Stanzas that already exist are skipped, so stanza-create is safe to run again, e.g. after a new repository is configured.

Documentation Development

• Update the user guide.

Test Development

• Improve unit and integration tests.

• CI updates.

v2.45 — Block Incremental Backup (BETA)

Released: 2023-03-20

Core Bug Fixes

• Skip writing recovery.signal by default for restores of offline backups. On PostgreSQL >= 12, recovery.signal makes PostgreSQL fail to start when the backup was made offline with wal_level=minimal. Restore now skips writing it for offline backups unless type is set explicitly, e.g. for Point-in-Time Recovery from an offline backup made with a higher wal_level.

Core Features

• Block incremental backup (BETA). Block incremental stores only the parts of a file that changed since the prior backup instead of the entire file. Enable it with repo-block, which requires repo-bundle. The feature is in beta and also requires the beta option. Do not use it in production: the on-disk format will change before the GA release.

Core Improvements

• Keep only one all-default group index. An option that does not apply, e.g. repo2-s3-key when repo2-type is not s3, could add a phantom repository that has only default values. Repository and PostgreSQL indexes with only default values are now removed unless no other index remains.

Core Development

• Add pg-version-force option for fork integration.

• Add internal manifest command.

• Use uncrustify for code formatting.

• Improve error handling in build-code binary.

• Improve interface handling in storage module.

• Clean up code and comments.

• Update config.guess and config.sub to latest versions.

Documentation Improvements

• Add explicit instructions for upgrading between 2.x versions. A new user guide section explains that upgrading between 2.x versions requires only installing the new binaries. Downgrading is also possible when no features unsupported by the older version were used.

• Remove references to SSH made obsolete when TLS was introduced. The help for repo-host, pg-host, and their port options no longer refers to SSH as the only remote protocol. Details about SSH compression were also removed.

Documentation Development

• Fix contributors in release notes.

Test Development

• Improve unit tests.

v2.44 — Remove PostgreSQL 9.0/9.1/9.2 Support

Released: 2023-01-30

Core Improvements

• Remove support for PostgreSQL 9.0/9.1/9.2. pgBackRest now supports ten versions of PostgreSQL: the five supported versions and the last five EOL versions. As of PostgreSQL 15 that excludes 9.0, 9.1, and 9.2.

• Restore errors when no backup matches the current version of PostgreSQL. After a stanza-upgrade with no new backup, restore used the latest backup, which was made from the prior PostgreSQL version. Replicas built this way could fail. Restore now errors in this case unless set or type=time/type=lsn is specified.

• Add compress-level range checking for each compress-type. The compress-level range was 0-9 for every compress-type. This is the range for gz but a subset of what lz4 and zst allow. Each type now has its own range, e.g. -7 to 22 for zst.

Core Development

• Block-level incremental backup.

• Add repository checksum to make verify and resume more efficient.

• Add meson unity build and tests.

• Refactor common/ini module to remove callbacks and duplicated code.

• Audit memory contexts returned from functions and fix leaks.

• Improve libbacktrace implementation.

• Fix error detail output to stderr.

• Improve debug, check, and buffer macros.

• Clean up code and comments.

• Update LICENSE.txt and PostgreSQL copyright for 2023.

Documentation Improvements

• Add warning about enabling "hierarchical namespace" on Azure storage. With "hierarchical namespace" enabled, Azure requires directories to be deleted separately and expire fails. The user guide now warns not to enable it.

• Add replacement for linefeeds in monitoring example. The monitoring example failed when info output contained a linefeed, e.g. in some error messages, because COPY converts \n to a linefeed that jsonb rejects. The example now replaces linefeeds before converting to jsonb.

• Clarify target-action behavior on various PostgreSQL versions. The effect of pause depends on hot_standby and the PostgreSQL version. With hot_standby=off, pause acts like shutdown on PostgreSQL >= 12 and like promote on earlier versions.

• Updates and clarifications to index page. The section about other backup solutions not supporting parallel processing was no longer accurate and has been reworded. Other sections were updated for current terminology and clarity.

• Add dark mode to the website. The website uses dark colors when the browser prefers a dark color scheme.

Documentation Development

• Update RHEL user guide to PostgreSQL 11/12.

Test Development

• Improve unit tests and test tools.

• CI updates.

v2.43 — Bug Fix

Released: 2022-11-28

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix missing reference in diff/incr backup. In v2.42 a diff or incr backup failed with "unable to find '...' in string list" when its prior backup was made by an earlier version. The reference list built for a manifest from an earlier version now includes the backup's own label.

Core Improvements

• Add hint when an option is specified without an index. An option that requires an index, e.g. repo-storage-ca-file, now errors with a hint that shows the indexed name, e.g. repo1-storage-ca-file. A deprecated option also gets a hint with its current name.

Core Development

• Update config.guess and config.sub to latest versions.

v2.42 — Bug Fixes

Released: 2022-11-22

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix memory leak in file bundle backup/restore. Restore freed some I/O objects for bundled files only after every file in the bundle was restored. With many small files in a bundle, memory use grew until restore failed with "unable to allocate". Backup had a similar, smaller leak when resuming.

• Fix protocol error on short read of remote file. A remote file read that stopped early or failed partway left the protocol in a bad state. The next command failed with "client state is 'data-get' but expected 'idle'" and the original error was lost. The rest of the file is now read when the file is closed.

Core Improvements

• Do not store references for zero-length files when bundling. Bundled diff/incr backups stored a reference to a prior backup for zero-length files, which are not stored in any backup. The reference was ignored on restore but used space in the manifest.

• Use more generic descriptions for pg_start_backup()/pg_stop_backup(). PostgreSQL 15 renamed these functions to pg_backup_start()/pg_backup_stop(). The logs and documentation now use descriptions that do not depend on the PostgreSQL version.

Core Development

• Block incremental backup groundwork.

• Move link creation to storage interface.

• Do not log bundle info when a file is delta matched from a prior backup.

• Return binary as result from CryptoHash filter.

• Clean up code and comments.

• Finalize catalog number for PostgreSQL 15 release.

• Update config.guess and config.sub to latest versions.

Documentation Development

• Add missed release note for v2.41.

Test Improvements

• Update test.pl --psql-bin option to match command-line help. The help showed --psql-bin but the option was named --pgsql-bin. The option now has the name shown in the help.

Test Development

• Improve unit tests and test tools.

• CI updates.

v2.41 — Backup Annotations

Released: 2022-09-19

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix incorrect time expiration being used for non-default repositories. When expire ran without repo, the time-based repo-retention-full for every repository was read from the lowest-numbered repository. Each repository now uses its own value.

• Fix issue when listing directories recursively with a filter. repo-ls with recurse and filter could fail with a double free or segfault when the last entry in a directory was a directory that had entries. A parent list was freed before the entries of its subdirectories were processed.

Core Features

• Backup key/value annotations. Add key/value annotations to a backup with the annotation option of the backup command, and add, modify, or remove them later with the new annotate command. The info command shows annotations in text output when set is specified and always includes them in JSON output.

Core Improvements

• Support --set in JSON output for info command. With set, JSON output from info now includes the details that text output already showed, e.g. the error and tablespace lists.

• Allow upload chunk size to be configured for object stores. Set repo-storage-upload-chunk-size to change the size of each upload chunk for S3, GCS, or Azure. Larger chunks can improve performance but use more memory. The defaults are unchanged.

• Update archive.info timestamps after a successful backup. archive.info and its copy were written only by stanza-create and stanza-upgrade, and an object store lifecycle policy that expires old files could remove them. Their timestamps are now updated after each successful backup.

• Move standby timeline check after checkpoint. The check that the standby is on the expected timeline used pg_control as it was before the backup started. Right after a promotion the standby may not have written the new timeline to pg_control yet, and the backup failed with "standby is on timeline ... but expected ...". The check now runs after the checkpoint.

• Improve warning message on backup resume. The warning read as if the user needed to take action. It now states that invalid files will be removed and then the backup will resume.

Core Development

• Skip mem context cleanup in CATCH_FATAL() block.

• Do not allow CATCH() to catch a fatal error.

• Add FN_INLINE_ALWAYS macro.

• Clear ProtocolClient callback after connection error.

• Improve the code builder.

• Update config.guess to latest version.

Documentation Improvements

• Add absolute path for kill in pgbackrest.service. The pgbackrest.service example now uses /bin/kill in ExecReload. Older versions of systemd require an absolute path.

Documentation Development

• Allow host memory limits in the user guide to be disabled.

• Add missed reviewer to the release notes.

Test Development

• Build unit and performance tests with the C test harness.

• Improve unit tests and test tools.

• Update Minio test/documentation container version.

• CI updates.

v2.40 — OpenSSL 3 Support

Released: 2022-07-18

Core Improvements

• OpenSSL 3 support. pgBackRest now builds with OpenSSL 3. Deprecation warnings are suppressed, and an unexpected EOF is detected with the error codes that OpenSSL 3 reports.

• Create snapshot when listing contents of a path. A path listed without sorting was read while its entries were processed. When files were deleted during the listing, some filesystems skipped files that still existed and the path could not be removed. Listings now always use a snapshot of the path.

• Force target-timeline=current when restore type=immediate. On PostgreSQL >= 12 the default target timeline is latest, and recovery could fail when the latest timeline in the repository cannot be reached from the backup. Restore with type=immediate does not change timelines, so it now sets the target timeline to current.

• Truncate files during delta restore when they are larger than expected. Delta restore copied a file from the repository whenever its size differed from the manifest. A larger file is now truncated to the size in the manifest and copied only when its checksum does not match. Files that were only appended to, e.g. logs, are no longer copied.

• Disable incremental manifest save when resume=n. During a backup the manifest is saved periodically for use by resume. These saves are now skipped when resume=n.

• Set backup percent complete to zero before copy start. The progress of a running backup was not reported until the first file was copied. It is now set to zero when copying starts.

• Use S3 IsTruncated flag to determine list continuation. Recent versions of Scality send an empty NextContinuationToken when a list is not truncated, which caused an infinite loop. The IsTruncated flag now determines whether a list continues, and a missing or empty token for a truncated list is an error.

Core Development

• Automatically create PostgreSQL version interfaces.

• Improve memory usage of mem contexts.

• Add FN_NO_RETURN macro.

• Add cast to handle compilers (e.g. MSVC) that coerce to signed int.

• Fix hard-coded WAL size assertion in walSegmentNext().

• Add labels in parse.auto.c to make diffs easier to read.

• Fix repository option definitions for the backup and stanza commands.

• Use storagePathP() instead of cfgOptionStr() to get base repo path.

• Add additional detail to warnings when delta checksum is auto-enabled.

• Clean up code and comments.

• Replace AC_PROG_CC_C99 configure macro with AC_PROG_CC.

• Update config.guess to latest version.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Skip internal options in the configuration reference. Options that are internal only for some commands were listed in the configuration reference. The command-line help was not affected.

Documentation Improvements

• Add link to PostgreSQL configuration in repository host section.

Documentation Development

• Fix RHEL container build for documentation.

• Update release notes.

Test Improvements

• Add experimental Meson build. Meson has simpler syntax and better performance than autoconf/make. It is used for code generation and test builds, and errors on anything but a debug build. Packagers should continue to use autoconf/make.

• Allow any path to be passed to the --test-path option.

• Fix compile error when DEBUG_EXEC_TIME is defined without DEBUG. Without DEBUG the ASSERT() that used the start time expanded to nothing, and the unused variable caused a compile error. The check now uses CHECK().

Test Development

• Add experimental unit test harness written in C.

• Improve unit and integration tests.

• CI updates.

v2.39 — Verify and File Bundling

Released: 2022-05-16

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix error thrown from FINALLY() causing an infinite loop. An error thrown in a FINALLY() block returned to the same block, where the error was likely thrown again and caused an infinite loop. FINALLY() now runs only once.

• Error on all lock failures except another process holding the lock. archive-get/archive-push did not error when the lock could not be taken for another reason, e.g. permissions, and the async process was not launched. The user got a generic failure message and there was no async log. These failures are now errors.

Core Features

• Backup file bundling for improved small file support. Bundling stores small files together in the repository to save time and space during backup, especially on object stores where creating each file is expensive. Enable it with repo-bundle and tune it with repo-bundle-size and repo-bundle-limit. Restore reads adjacent files in a bundle with a single read.

• Verify command to validate the contents of a repository. The verify command checks that the backups and WAL in the repository are valid. Set output=text to print the results and verbose to include what was verified successfully along with errors.

• PostgreSQL 15 support. PostgreSQL 15 removes exclusive backup, renames the backup start/stop functions, and drops pg_database.datlastsysoid, which pgBackRest no longer uses.

• Show backup percent complete in info output. info shows the percent complete of a running backup on the host where the backup is running. JSON output reports it as an integer, the percent times 100.

• Auto-select backup for restore command --type=lsn. With type=lsn, restore now selects the most recent backup that stopped at or before the target LSN.

• Suppress existing WAL warning when archive-mode-check is disabled. With archive-mode-check=n and WAL pushed from multiple hosts, a WAL file already in the archive with the same checksum is expected and no longer logs a warning. A different checksum is still an error.

• Add AWS IMDSv2 support. IMDSv2 protects the instance metadata that provides credentials for repo-s3-key-type=auto. pgBackRest falls back to IMDSv1 when the IMDSv2 token request fails.

Core Improvements

• Allow repo-hardlink option to be changed after full backup. Changing repo-hardlink required a new full backup. It can now be changed at any time, e.g. to disable it for file bundling.

• Increase precision of percent complete logging for backup and restore. Percent complete is now logged with hundredths, which gives more frequent updates for large backups and restores.

• Improve path validation for repo-* commands. A path may not contain //, a trailing / is removed, and an absolute path must be in the repository path.

• Improve stop command to honor stanza option. stop with force and stanza now terminates only the processes holding locks for that stanza. Before, it terminated processes for all stanzas.

• Improve error message for invalid repo-azure-key. With repo-azure-key-type=shared, repo-azure-key is now checked for valid base64.

• Add hint to check the log on archive-get/archive-push async error. When the async process cannot write its status files, archive-get/archive-push times out with a generic error. The error now includes a hint with the path of the async log, which contains the actual error.

• Add ClockError for unexpected clock skew and timezone changes.

• Strip extensions from history manifest before showing in error message. When a new backup label was not later than the latest label from the backup history, the error showed the history manifest name, e.g. 20220504-222042F_20220504-222141I.manifest.gz. It now shows only the label.

• Add user:group to lock permission error.

• Add hint when unable to find the primary cluster. The "unable to find primary cluster" error now includes a hint asking whether all available clusters are in recovery.

Core Development

• Improve JSON handling.

• Add default for boolean options with unresolved dependencies.

• Lock module refactoring.

• Prevent memContextFree() from freeing memory needed by callbacks.

• Refactor PgClient to return results in Pack format.

• Fix undefined behavior found by sanitizers.

• Fix memory leaks and improve memory context usage.

• Add and improve macros.

• Add and improve string functions.

• Refactor remote storage protocol to use Packs instead of JSON.

• Fix reported error line number when ini key length is zero.

• Clean up code and comments.

• Update config.guess and config.sub to latest versions.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fix incorrect reference to stanza-update in the user guide.

• Fix example for repo-gcs-key-type option in configuration reference. The example was none, which is not a valid value. It is now auto.

• Fix tls-server-auth example and add clarifications. The example was missing the client CN and is now client-cn=stanza1. The help also states that wildcards are not allowed for the client CN.

Documentation Improvements

• Simplify messaging around supported versions in the documentation. The user guides listed PostgreSQL version ranges, which made it look like other versions were not supported, e.g. PostgreSQL 12 on RHEL. The ranges were removed and the introduction now explains which versions the user guides cover.

• Add option type descriptions. The configuration reference now describes each option type, e.g. the units for size options, rather than repeating the description for each option.

• Add FAQ about backup types and restore speed. A new FAQ explains that the backup type affects only the backup and not how fast a restore runs.

• Document required base branch for pull requests. The contributing guide now states that pull requests must be based on the integration branch.

Documentation Development

• Fix typos and formatting in the documentation and help.

Test Development

• Remove integration expect log testing.

• Improve unit tests and test tools.

• CI updates.

v2.38 — Minor Bug Fixes and Improvements

Released: 2022-03-06

Core Bug Fixes

• Retry errors in S3 batch file delete. A failed batch delete was retried, but errors for individual files in the batch were not, and pgBackRest could terminate during expire or when removing a backup that could not be resumed. Files that fail in a batch are now deleted individually with the usual HTTP retries.

• Allow case-insensitive matching of HTTP connection header values. The HTTP specification allows connection header values in any case, e.g. Close.

Core Features

• Add support for AWS S3 server-side encryption using KMS. Set repo-s3-kms-key-id to encrypt objects with a key managed by AWS KMS.

• Add archive-missing-retry option. By default archive-get retries a WAL segment it already reported as missing, which ignores missing notifications left in the spool path by a prior restore. With archive-missing-retry=n, PostgreSQL can detect the end of the archive and switch to streaming even while WAL is being archived. The spool path must then be empty when recovery starts.

• Add backup type filter to info command. Set type to show only backups of that type, e.g. type=full.

Core Improvements

• Retry on page validation failure during backup. A page that fails checksum validation is now read again. It is reported as an error only when it has not changed. A changed page is being written by PostgreSQL, and the WAL contains a full page image. Zero pages are now checked to be all zeroes rather than only by the pd_upper field.

• Handle TLS servers that do not close connections gracefully. Some servers close the socket rather than the TLS connection. When a response has no content length or chunked encoding and its content can be parsed, the closed socket is now treated as EOF. These servers stopped working in v2.35.

• Add backup LSNs to info command output. The start and stop LSNs of a backup are shown with set and in JSON output, for use with LSN-based Point-in-Time Recovery.

• Automatically strip trailing slashes for repo-ls paths. A trailing slash on the path made repo-ls show no content on some repository storage types.

• Do not retry fatal errors. Retrying fatal errors, especially out of memory errors, may cause lockups. Assertion and memory errors are now reported without retrying.

• Remove support for PostgreSQL 8.3/8.4. There is no evidence that these versions are still in use and supporting them costs development and test time. Use an older version of pgBackRest to back up or migrate from these versions.

• Remove logic that tried to determine additional file system compression. After a file was copied, pgBackRest checked its size on disk to detect compression by the file system, e.g. ZFS. This was untested, slow with many small files, and blocked file bundling. The repository size in info is now what pgBackRest wrote.

Core Development

• Disconnect help.auto.c from build-help in Makefile.

• Improve small file support.

• Refactor lock code.

• Configuration refactoring.

• Add XML to invalid XML error message.

• Fix invalid file descriptor being passed to close().

• Add ioCopy().

• Clean up code and comments.

• Update config.guess and config.sub to latest versions.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Move repo options in TLS documentation to the global section. The user guide set these options in the stanza section, which works in some cases but is not best practice.

• Remove unused backup-standby option from stanza commands. stanza-create and stanza-upgrade listed backup-standby in the command reference and help, but did not use it.

• Fix typos in help and release notes.

Documentation Improvements

• Add aliveness check to systemd service configuration. The pgbackrest.service example now checks that the server is still running shortly after it starts. Before, a server that failed to start reported no error while systemd retried in the background.

• Add FAQ explaining WAL archive suffix. The suffix on a WAL file in the repository is its SHA1 checksum, which is used to verify the file. It cannot be omitted.

• Note that replications slots are not restored.

Documentation Development

• Update the user guide.

• Improve the documentation build.

• Update the release notes and NEWS.md.

Test Development

• Improve unit tests.

• CI updates.

v2.37 — TLS Server

Released: 2022-01-03

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix restore delta link mapping when path/file already exists. When link-map or link-all mapped a path or file that already existed to a link, a delta restore left the existing path or file in place. It is now replaced by the link.

• Fix socket leak on connection retries. In optimized builds the socket of a failed connection attempt was not closed, and each retry leaked a socket.

Core Features

• Add TLS server. The server command starts a TLS server that can be used instead of SSH to reach repository and PostgreSQL hosts. Set repo-host-type=tls or pg-host-type=tls on the client, and configure certificates and client authorization with the tls-server-* options. SIGHUP reloads the configuration and SIGTERM stops the server.

• Add --cmd option. Set cmd to the pgBackRest executable used in commands that pgBackRest writes, e.g. restore_command in recovery.conf.

Core Improvements

• Check archive immediately after backup start. A backup failed because WAL archiving was not working only after all files were copied. The archive is now checked right after the backup starts. On an idle system a restore point is created to switch the WAL segment.

• Add timeline and checkpoint checks to backup. The backup now checks that pg_control has the checkpoint and timeline of the backup start, and that a standby is following the primary, i.e. it is on the same timeline and its checkpoint is not later than the backup checkpoint.

• Check that clusters are alive and correctly configured during a backup. A backup now fails as soon as a cluster stops or the standby is promoted. Before, a stopped primary was detected only at the end of the backup and a promoted standby was not detected.

• Error when restore is unable to find a backup to match the time target. This was a warning that was easy to miss, and a lot of time could be lost restoring a backup that cannot reach the target.

• Parse protocol/port in S3/Azure endpoints. repo-s3-endpoint, repo-azure-endpoint, and repo-storage-host may now include a protocol and port, e.g. https://host:9000.

• Add warning when checkpoint_timeout exceeds db-timeout. With start-fast=n, a backup can time out waiting for the checkpoint when checkpoint_timeout is greater than db-timeout. The backup now warns in this case.

• Add verb to HTTP error output.

• Allow y/n arguments for boolean command-line options.

• Make backup size logging exactly match info command output. The logged backup size now includes only the files copied, plus backup_label and tablespace_map. Before, e.g. an incremental backup after a switchover logged the size of every file checked.

Core Development

• Simplify error handler.

• Add StringId as an option type.

• Do not delete manifests individually during stanza delete.

• Add error type and message to CHECK() macro.

• Clean up and refactor code.

• Update LICENSE.txt and PostgreSQL copyright for 2022.

Documentation Improvements

• Display size option default and allowed values with appropriate units.

• Fix typos and improve documentation for the tablespace-map-all option.

• Remove obsolete statement about future multi-repository support. The documentation stated that only one repository was allowed, but multiple repositories have been supported since v2.33.

Documentation Development

• Update the user guide.

• Update the release notes and RELEASE.md.

Test Development

• Improve unit and performance tests.

v2.36 — Minor Bug Fixes and Improvements

Released: 2021-11-01

Core Bug Fixes

• Allow "global" as a stanza prefix. A stanza name that begins with global, e.g. global_stanza, was rejected because the config parser treated it as a global section.

• Fix segfault on invalid GCS key file. A GCS key file without the client email, private key, or token URI caused a segfault. It now causes an error.

Core Improvements

• Allow link-map option to create new links. link-map could only remap links that were in the backup. It can now create a new link for any path or file in the backup.

• Increase max index allowed for pg/repo options to 256. The maximum index was 8 for pg options and 4 for repo options. Both are now 256, e.g. pg256-path.

• Add WebIdentity authentication for AWS S3. Set repo-s3-key-type=web-id to get credentials automatically in an EKS environment.

• Add repo-azure-uri-style option. Set repo-azure-uri-style to host (default) or path to select the URI style for Azure. Azurite uses host-style URIs when the endpoint looks like a multipart host name.

• Report backup file validation errors in backup.info. Errors found during a backup, e.g. invalid page checksums, were shown only by info with set. A flag in backup.info now shows in text and JSON output that a backup has errors. The details still require set.

• Add recovery start time to online backup restore log. Restore now logs the time that recovery will start from, which shows how much WAL must be replayed.

• Report original error and retries on local job failure. When a local job fails after its retries, the error now reports the first error with its stack trace, followed by the retry errors. Before, only the last error was reported, which was often a cascade failure such as the protocol being out of sync.

• Rename page checksum error to error list in info text output. The label in info text output is now "error list" rather than "page checksum error". A file may have an alignment error rather than a page checksum error.

• Add hints to standby replay timeout message. The timeout waiting for the standby to replay now has hints to check that replication is running and to disable backup-standby to back up from the primary.

Core Development

• Add TLS server.

• Store config values as a union instead of a variant.

• Migrate command-line help generation to C.

• Improve the Pack type and use it for filters and configuration rules.

• Simplify configuration rules.

• Improve memory allocation and mem context handling.

• Add configurable storage helpers to create repository storage.

• More efficient generation of diff/incr backup label.

• Add -Werror -Wfatal-errors -g flags to configure --enable-test.

• Add required header for Illumos.

• Clean up code and comments.

• Finalize catalog number for PostgreSQL 14 release.

• Update config.guess and config.sub to latest versions.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fix incorrect host name in user guide. The replication setup used the IP address of pg-primary in pg_hba.conf rather than the IP address of pg-standby.

Documentation Improvements

• Improve option documentation. The help for buffer-size now describes all the operations that use it, the descriptions of cmd-ssh, repo-host-cmd, and pg-host-cmd are consistent, and archive-header-check moved to the archive section of the configuration reference.

Documentation Development

• Eliminate linefeed formatting from documentation.

• Update the user guide and documentation build.

• Add analytics to the HTML documentation.

• Update the index page, README.md, and contributing documentation.

Test Development

• Improve unit tests and test tools.

• CI updates.

v2.35 — Binary Protocol

Released: 2021-08-23

Core Bug Fixes

• Detect errors in S3 multi-part upload finalize. Completing a multi-part upload can fail even when S3 returns HTTP success. A response without an ETag is now treated as a failure, and the job is retried.

• Fix detection of circular symlinks. Links were followed before they were checked, and a circular link sent the manifest build into endless recursion and a crash.

• Only pass selected repo options to the remote. Options for other repositories could cause conflicts on the remote, which uses exactly one repository.

Core Improvements

• Binary protocol. Local and remote processes now communicate with the binary pack format rather than JSON. Packs are more compact, faster to render and parse, and strictly typed. Each message is written in one place, which makes an error less likely to leave the protocol in a bad state, and messages have no size limit.

• Automatically create data directory on restore. A check migrated from Perl prevented restore from creating the data directory.

• Allow restore --type=lsn. Set type=lsn and an LSN in target to recover to an LSN on PostgreSQL >= 10.

• Change level of backup/restore copied file logging to detail. This makes the info log level less noisy. Set the log level to detail to see each copied file.

• Loop while waiting for checkpoint LSN to reach replay LSN. On a standby the checkpoint LSN can lag slightly behind the replay LSN until pg_control is updated. The backup now keeps checking rather than failing.

• Log backup file total and restore size/file total. The backup size is now logged at the end of the backup and includes files added to the manifest after the main copy, e.g. backup_label and WAL. Restore now logs its size and file total.

Core Development

• Add support for more Pack types.

• Clear error when a CATCH() block finishes.

• Migrate config and error code generation to C.

• Fix miscalculation in time option command defaults.

• Refactor local/remote startup.

• Fix infinite loop in protocolServerProcess() on error.

• Add temp mem context reset blocks in job processing loops.

• Clean up code and comments.

• Update config.guess and config.sub to latest versions.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fix incorrect host names in user guide. Some examples showed pg1 rather than the host name, and the install block installed packages on the build host no matter which host was specified.

Documentation Improvements

• Update contributing documentation and add pull request template. The contributing guide now has a table of contents and sections on understanding test output and submitting a pull request. GitHub now shows a template for new pull requests.

• Rearrange backup documentation in user guide. The "Fast Start Option" and "Archive Timeout" sections moved to "Quick Start - Perform Backup". The "Automatic Stop Option" section, which applies only to PostgreSQL <= 9.6, was removed.

• Clarify restore --type behavior in command reference. The reference now states that set must be specified when the target is before the latest backup and type is not time.

• Fix documentation and comment typos.

Documentation Development

• Add optional stress test section to the user guide.

• Add linefeeds around content even when not in pretty mode.

Test Improvements

• Add check for test path inside repo path. A test path inside the repository path caused strange failures because the repository is copied into the test path. test.pl now errors in this case.

• Add CodeQL static code analysis. CodeQL now runs in CI. Issues it found were fixed, e.g. gmtime()/localtime() were replaced with gmtime_r()/localtime_r().

• Update tests to use standard patterns.

Test Development

• Improve test harness macros.

• Improve unit tests and test tools.

• CI updates.

v2.34 — PostgreSQL 14 Support

Released: 2021-06-07

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix issues with leftover spool files from a prior restore. A notification left in the spool path by a prior restore could make archive-get report a WAL segment as missing. When this notification is found on the first check, it is now removed and the async process is run again. An error is reported when the async process does not respond, rather than reporting the WAL segment as missing.

• Fix issue when checking links for large numbers of tablespaces. The link check used a lot of memory with many tablespaces and could crash. The new check is much faster, uses far less memory, and also detects duplicate file links.

• Free no longer needed remotes so they do not timeout during restore. The connections to remotes were held for the whole restore and could time out, which logged a harmless but distracting warning at the end of a long restore. They are now closed after the manifest is loaded.

• Fix help when a valid option is invalid for the specified command. help segfaulted when asked about an option that is not valid for the command.

Core Features

• Add PostgreSQL 14 support. PostgreSQL 14 needs no code changes from PostgreSQL 13. The catalog version may now change during the PostgreSQL beta/rc period without requiring a new pgBackRest release.

• Add automatic GCS authentication for GCE instances. Set repo-gcs-key-type=auto to get the authentication token from the instance metadata on a GCE instance.

• Add repo-retention-history option to expire backup history. Set the number of days of backup history to keep. By default all history is kept, and history for backups still in the repository is never expired. When a full backup manifest expires, the manifests of its differential and incremental backups expire as well.

• Add db-exclude option. Restore excludes the specified databases by writing them as sparse, zeroed files. PostgreSQL can still perform recovery, and the databases can be dropped after recovery. With db-include, db-exclude applies only to the system databases template0, template1, and postgres.

Core Improvements

• Change archive expiration logging from detail to info level.

• Remove stanza archive spool path on restore. Files in the spool path could interfere with the new cluster, e.g. old archive-push acknowledgements could make it skip archiving WAL.

• Do not write files atomically or sync paths during backup copy. Atomic writes are not needed since checksums are validated when a failed backup is resumed, and all paths are synced at the end of the backup.

Core Development

• Replace getopt_long() with custom implementation.

• Add help for all internal options valid for default roles.

• Add StringId type.

• Add local process shim.

• Add cfgOptionDisplay()/cfgOptionIdxDisplay().

• Revert to checking catalog version for all PostgreSQL versions.

• Rename default command role to main.

• Simplify defaults for --force option.

• Refactor modules with inline getters/setters.

• Clean up code and comments.

• Update config.sub to latest version.

Documentation Improvements

• Update contributing documentation. The contributing guide has more examples of how to write code, add configuration options, and test.

• Consolidate RHEL/CentOS user guide into a single document. The second guide existed mainly to document stop-auto for PostgreSQL <= 9.5, which is now EOL. The option is still documented in the reference.

• Clarify that repo-s3-role is not an ARN.

Documentation Development

• Update the user guide and release documentation.

Test Development

• Improve test harness macros.

• Improve unit tests and test tools.

• CI updates.

v2.33 — Multi-Repository and GCS Support

Released: 2021-04-05

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix option warnings breaking async archive-get/archive-push. An option warning in the async process was logged to a closed stdout, which made the process abort. Since the async role can now have different valid options than the default role, this happened more often. Option warnings are now logged only for the default role.

• Fix memory leak in backup during archive copy. Copying WAL into the backup with archive-copy leaked memory, especially when the WAL needed to be recompressed.

• Fix stack overflow in cipher passphrase generation. The buffer for the generated passphrase had no room for the terminating zero. This was found on arm64 with musl libc.

• Fix repo-ls / on S3 repositories. S3 reports / as a file without the expected headers, which caused an error. / is now reported as not existing on storage that does not support paths.

Core Features

• Multiple repository support. Up to four repositories may be configured, e.g. a local repository for fast restores and a remote repository for redundancy. archive-push pushes WAL to all repositories, and backups are scheduled for each repository. Some commands work with all repositories, while others require repo. repo is not required when only repo1 is configured.

• GCS support for repository storage. Set repo-type=gcs to store the repository on GCS or a GCS-compatible object store.

• Add archive-header-check option. The WAL header is checked against the PostgreSQL version and system identifier to make sure WAL is pushed to the correct stanza. The check is enabled by default and can be disabled when needed, e.g. for encrypted WAL.

Core Improvements

• Include recreated system databases during selective restore. A system database (template0, template1, or postgres) that was recreated has an OID that makes it look like a user database. These databases are now always restored, whatever their OID.

• Exclude content-length from S3 signed headers. Some proxies modify the content-length header, which made authentication fail when it was signed.

• Consolidate less commonly used repository storage options. The S3 and Azure CA, host, port, and TLS verification options are renamed to repo-storage-*, e.g. repo1-s3-host is now repo1-storage-host. The old names are still accepted.

• Allow custom config-path default with ./configure --with-configdir. Packagers can set a different default for config-path when building. Without the option the default is still /etc/pgbackrest.

• Log archive copy during backup.

Core Development

• Improve protocol handlers.

• Add HttpUrl object.

• Move configuration definition to src/build/config/config.yaml.

• Improve storage drivers.

• Improve the configure script.

• Update help.auto.c missed in prior commits.

• Clean up code and comments.

• Update config.guess and config.sub to latest versions.

Documentation Improvements

• Update reference to include links to user guide examples. The command reference now links to the user guide sections with examples, and some descriptions were clarified, e.g. set for expire.

• Update selective restore documentation with caveats. Recovery may fail unless type=immediate is specified, because PostgreSQL reports zeroed pages as errors after consistency is reached. On PostgreSQL >= 13 ignore_invalid_pages may be used, but check the logs for invalid pages in the selected databases.

• Add compress-type clarification to archive-copy documentation. WAL must be recompressed when archive-push and backup use a different compress-type, which can be expensive.

• Add compress-level defaults per compress-type value. The defaults are 9 for bz2, 6 for gz, 1 for lz4, and 3 for zst.

• Add note about required NFS settings being the same as PostgreSQL.

Documentation Development

• Fix option validity by role and make sections conform to C help.

• Improve the documentation build and release notes.

Test Development

• Improve unit tests and test tools.

v2.32 — Repository Commands

Released: 2021-02-08

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix resume after partial delete of backup by prior resume.

Core Features

• Add repo-ls command.

• Add repo-get command.

• Add archive-mode-check option.

Core Improvements

• Improve archive-get performance.

Core Development

• Partial multi-repository implementation.

• Add backup verification to internal verify command.

• Add pack type.

• Allow option validity to be determined by command role.

• Add job-retry and job-retry-interval options.

• Replace double type with time in config module.

Documentation Improvements

• Improve expire command documentation.

v2.31 — Minor Bug Fixes and Improvements

Released: 2020-12-07

Core Bug Fixes

• Allow [, #, and space as the first character in database names.

• Create standby.signal only on PostgreSQL 12 when restore type is standby.

Core Features

• Expire history files.

• Report page checksum errors in info command text output.

• Add repo-azure-endpoint option.

• Add pg-database option.

Core Improvements

• Improve info command output when a stanza is specified but missing.

• Improve performance of large file lists in backup/restore commands.

• Add retries to PostgreSQL sleep when starting a backup.

Core Development

• Prepare configuration module for multi-repository support.

• Optimize small reads in IoRead.

• Allow multiple remote locks from the same main process.

• Conform retry in lockAcquireFile() to the common retry pattern.

• Assert when buffer used is greater than size limit.

Documentation Improvements

• Replace RHEL/CentOS 6 documentation with RHEL/CentOS 8.

v2.30 — PostgreSQL 13 Support

Released: 2020-10-05

Core Bug Fixes

• Error with hints when backup user cannot read pg_settings.

Core Features

• PostgreSQL 13 support.

Core Improvements

• Improve PostgreSQL version identification.

• Improve working directory error message.

• Add hint about starting the stanza when WAL segment not found.

• Add hint for protocol version mismatch.

Core Development

• Add internal verify command.

• Allow ProtocolParallel to complete with no jobs.

Documentation Improvements

• Add note that pgBackRest versions must match when running remotely.

• Move info command text to the reference and link to user guide.

• Update yum repository path for CentOS/RHEL user guide.

v2.29 — Auto S3 Credentials on AWS

Released: 2020-08-31

Core Bug Fixes

• Suppress errors when closing local/remote processes. Since the command has completed it is counterproductive to throw an error but still warn to indicate that something unusual happened.

• Fix issue with = character in file or database names.

Core Features

• Automatically retrieve temporary S3 credentials on AWS instances.

• Add archive-mode option to disable archiving on restore.

Core Improvements

• PostgreSQL 13 beta3 support. Changes to the control/catalog/WAL versions in subsequent betas may break compatibility but pgBackRest will be updated with each release to keep pace.

• Asynchronous list/remove for S3/Azure storage.

• Improve memory usage of unlogged relation detection in manifest build.

• Proactively close file descriptors after forking async process.

• Delay backup remote connection close until after archive check.

• Improve detailed error output.

• Improve TLS error reporting.

Core Development

• Allow HttpClient/HttpSession to work on plain sockets.

• Add support for HTTP/1.0.

• Add general-purpose statistics collector.

• Add user-agent to HTTP requests.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Add none to compress-type option reference and fix example.

• Add missing azure type in repo-type option reference.

• Fix typo in repo-cipher-type option reference.

Documentation Improvements

• Clarify that expire must be run regularly when expire-auto is disabled.

v2.28 — Azure Repository Storage

Released: 2020-07-20

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix restore --force acting like --force --delta. This caused restore to replace files based on timestamp and size rather than overwriting, which meant some files that should have been updated were left unchanged. Normal restore and restore --delta were not affected by this issue.

Core Features

• Azure support for repository storage.

• Add expire-auto option. This allows automatic expiration after a successful backup to be disabled.

Core Improvements

• Asynchronous S3 multipart upload.

• Automatic retry for backup, restore, archive-get, and archive-push.

• Disable query parallelism in PostgreSQL sessions used for backup control.

• PostgreSQL 13 beta2 support. Changes to the control/catalog/WAL versions in subsequent betas may break compatibility but pgBackRest will be updated with each release to keep pace.

• Improve handling of invalid HTTP response status.

• Improve error when pg1-path option missing for archive-get command.

• Add hint when checksum delta is enabled after a timeline switch.

• Use PostgreSQL instead of postmaster where appropriate.

Core Development

• Automatically determine cipher passphrase in repo-get command.

• Fix expression when recursion enabled in storageInfoListP().

• Improve behavior of the repo-ls command.

• Inline strPtr() to increase profiling accuracy.

• Add pgLsnFromWalSegment().

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fix incorrect example for repo-retention-full-type option.

• Remove internal commands from HTML and man command references.

Documentation Improvements

• Update PostgreSQL versions used to build user guides. Also add version ranges to indicate that a user guide is accurate for a range of PostgreSQL versions even if it was built for a specific version.

• Update FAQ for expiring a specific backup set.

• Update FAQ to clarify default PITR behavior.

Test Development

• Remove real/all integration tests now covered by unit tests.

• Rename most instances of master to primary in tests.

v2.27 — Expiration Improvements and Compression Drivers

Released: 2020-05-26

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix issue checking if file links are contained in path links.

• Allow pg-path1 to be optional for synchronous archive-push.

• The expire command now checks if a stop file is present.

• Handle missing reason phrase in HTTP response.

• Increase buffer size for lz4 compression flush.

• Ignore pg-host* and repo-host* options for the remote command.

• Fix possibly missing pg1-* options for the remote command.

Core Features

• Time-based retention for full backups. The --repo-retention-full-type option allows retention of full backups based on a time period, specified in days.

• Ad hoc backup expiration. Allow the user to remove a specified backup regardless of retention settings.

• Zstandard compression support. Note that setting compress-type=zst will make new backups and archive incompatible (unrestorable) with prior versions of pgBackRest.

• bzip2 compression support. Note that setting compress-type=bz2 will make new backups and archive incompatible (unrestorable) with prior versions of pgBackRest.

• Add backup/expire running status to the info command.

Core Improvements

• Expire WAL archive only when repo-retention-archive threshold is met. WAL prior to the first full backup was previously expired after the first full backup. Now it is preserved according to retention settings.

• Add local MD5 implementation so S3 works when FIPS is enabled.

• PostgreSQL 13 beta1 support. Changes to the control/catalog/WAL versions in subsequent betas may break compatibility but pgBackRest will be updated with each release to keep pace.

• Reduce buffer-size default to 1MiB.

• Throw user-friendly error if expire is not run on repository host.

Core Development

• Enforce non-null for most string options.

v2.26 — Non-blocking TLS

Released: 2020-04-20

Core Bug Fixes

• Remove empty subexpression from manifest regular expression. MacOS was not happy about this though other platforms seemed to work fine.

Core Improvements

• Non-blocking TLS implementation.

• Only limit backup copy size for WAL-logged files. The prior behavior could possibly lead to postgresql.conf or postgresql.auto.conf being truncated in the backup.

• TCP keep-alive options are configurable.

• Add io-timeout option.

Core Development

• Simplify storage driver info and list functions.

• Split session functionality of SocketClient out into SocketSession.

• Split session functionality of TlsClient out into TlsSession.

• Use poll() instead of select() for monitoring socket read/write ready.

• Use SocketSession/TlsSession for test servers.

• Always throw error when OpenSSL returns SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL.

• Use __noreturn_ on error functions when coverage testing.

v2.25 — LZ4 Compression Support

Released: 2020-03-26

Core Features

• Add lz4 compression support. Note that setting compress-type=lz4 will make new backups and archive incompatible (unrestorable) with prior versions of pgBackRest.

• Add --dry-run option to the expire command. Use dry-run to see which backups/archive would be removed by the expire command without actually removing anything.

Core Improvements

• Improve performance of remote manifest build.

• Fix detection of keepalive options on Linux.

• Add configure host detection to set standards flags correctly.

• Remove compress/compress-level options from commands where unused. These commands (e.g. restore, archive-get) never used the compress options but allowed them to be passed on the command line. Now they will error when these options are passed on the command line. If these errors occur then remove the unused options.

• Limit backup file copy size to size reported at backup start. If a file grows during the backup it will be reconstructed by WAL replay during recovery so there is no need to copy the additional data.

Core Development

• Add infrastructure for multiple compression type support.

• Improve performance of MEM_CONTEXT*() macros.

• Allow storage reads to be limited by bytes.

v2.24 — Auto-Select Backup Set for Time Target

Released: 2020-02-25

Core Bug Fixes

• Prevent defunct processes in asynchronous archive commands.

• Error when archive-get/archive-push/restore are not run on a PostgreSQL host.

• Read HTTP content to eof when size/encoding not specified.

• Fix resume when the resumable backup was created by Perl. In this case the resumable backup should be ignored, but the C code was not able to load the partial manifest written by Perl since the format differs slightly. Add validations to catch this case and continue gracefully.

Core Features

• Auto-select backup set on restore when time target is specified. Auto-selection is performed only when --set is not specified. If a backup set for the given target time cannot not be found, the latest (default) backup set will be used.

Core Improvements

• Skip pg_internal.init temp file during backup.

• Add more validations to the manifest on backup.

Documentation Improvements

• Prevent lock-bot from adding comments to locked issues.

v2.23 — Bug Fix

Released: 2020-01-27

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix missing files corrupting the manifest. If a file was removed by PostgreSQL during the backup (or was missing from the standby) then the next file might not be copied and updated in the manifest. If this happened then the backup would error when restored.

Core Improvements

• Use pkg-config instead of xml2-config for libxml2 build options.

• Validate checksums are set in the manifest on backup/restore.

v2.22 — Bug Fix

Released: 2020-01-21

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix error in timeline conversion. The timeline is required to verify WAL segments in the archive after a backup. The conversion was performed base 10 instead of 16, which led to errors when the timeline was ≥ 0xA.

v2.21 — C Migration Complete

Released: 2020-01-15

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix options being ignored by asynchronous commands. The asynchronous archive-get/archive-push processes were not loading options configured in command configuration sections, e.g. [global:archive-get].

• Fix handling of \ in filenames. \ was not being properly escaped when calculating the manifest checksum which prevented the manifest from loading. Since instances of \ in cluster filenames should be rare to nonexistent this does not seem likely to be a serious problem in the field.

Core Features

• pgBackRest is now pure C.

• Add pg-user option. Specifies the database user name when connecting to PostgreSQL. If not specified pgBackRest will connect with the local OS user or PGUSER, which was the previous behavior.

• Allow path-style URIs in S3 driver.

Core Improvements

• The backup command is implemented entirely in C.

Core Development

• Add basic time management functions.

• Add httpLastModifiedToTime() to parse HTTP last-modified header.

• Parse dates in storageS3InfoList() and storageS3Info().

v2.20 — Bug Fixes

Released: 2019-12-12

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix archive-push/archive-get when PGDATA is symlinked. These commands tried to use cwd() as PGDATA but this would disagree with the path configured in pgBackRest if PGDATA was symlinked. If cwd() does not match the pgBackRest path then chdir() to the path and make sure the next cwd() matches the result from the first call.

• Fix reference list when backup.info is reconstructed in expire command. Since the backup command is still using the Perl version of reconstruct this issue will not express unless 1) there is a backup missing from backup.info and 2) the expire command is run directly instead of running after backup as usual. This unlikely combination of events means this is probably not a problem in the field.

• Fix segfault on unexpected EOF in gzip decompression.

Core Development

• Add manifest build for new backups.

v2.19 — C Migrations and Bug Fixes

Released: 2019-11-12

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix remote timeout in delta restore. When performing a delta restore on a largely unchanged cluster the remote could timeout if no files were fetched from the repository within protocol-timeout. Add keep-alives to prevent remote timeout.

• Fix handling of repeated HTTP headers. When HTTP headers are repeated they should be considered equivalent to a single comma-separated header rather than generating an error, which was the prior behavior.

Core Improvements

• JSON output from the info command is no longer pretty-printed. Monitoring systems can more easily ingest the JSON without linefeeds. External tools such as jq can be used to pretty-print if desired.

• The check command is implemented entirely in C.

Documentation Improvements

• Document how to contribute to pgBackRest.

• Document maximum version for auto-stop option.

Test Improvements

• Fix container test path being used when --vm=none.

• Fix mismatched timezone in expect test.

• Don't autogenerate embedded libc code by default.

v2.18 — PostgreSQL 12 Support

Released: 2019-10-01

Core Features

• PostgreSQL 12 support.

• Add info command set option for detailed text output. The additional details include databases that can be used for selective restore and a list of tablespaces and symlinks with their default destinations.

• Add standby restore type. This restore type automatically adds standby_mode=on to recovery.conf for PostgreSQL < 12 and creates standby.signal for PostgreSQL ≥ 12, creating a common interface between PostgreSQL versions.

Core Improvements

• The restore command is implemented entirely in C.

Core Development

• Migrate backup manifest load/save to C.

• Improve performance of info file load/save.

• Add helper function for adding CipherBlock filters to groups.

Documentation Improvements

• Document the relationship between db-timeout and protocol-timeout.

• Add documentation clarifications regarding standby repositories.

• Add FAQ for time-based Point-in-Time Recovery.

v2.17 — C Migrations and Bug Fixes

Released: 2019-09-03

Core Bug Fixes

• Improve slow manifest build for very large quantities of tables/segments.

• Fix exclusions for special files.

Core Improvements

• The stanza-create/update/delete commands are implemented entirely in C.

• The start/stop commands are implemented entirely in C.

• Create log directories/files with 0750/0640 mode.

Core Development

• Move info file checksum to the end of the file.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fix yum.p.o package being installed when custom package specified.

Documentation Improvements

• Build pgBackRest as an unprivileged user.

v2.16 — C Migrations and Bug Fixes

Released: 2019-08-05

Core Bug Fixes

• Retry S3 RequestTimeTooSkewed errors instead of immediately terminating.

• Fix incorrect handling of transfer-encoding response to HEAD request.

• Fix scoping violations exposed by optimizations in gcc 9.

Core Features

• Add repo-s3-port option for setting a non-standard S3 service port.

Core Improvements

• The local command for backup is implemented entirely in C.

• The check command is implemented partly in C.

Core Development

• Add Perl interface to C storage layer.

• Add Db object to encapsulate PostgreSQL queries and commands.

• Add PostgreSQL query client.

v2.15 — C Implementation of Expire

Released: 2019-06-25

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix archive retention expiring too aggressively.

Core Improvements

• The expire command is implemented entirely in C.

• The local command for restore is implemented entirely in C.

• Remove hard-coded PostgreSQL user so $PGUSER works.

• Honor configure --prefix option.

• Rename repo-s3-verify-ssl option to repo-s3-verify-tls. The new name is preferred because pgBackRest does not support any SSL protocol versions (they are all considered to be insecure). The old name will continue to be accepted.

Core Development

• Add most unimplemented functions to the remote storage driver.

• Rename info*New() functions to info*NewLoad().

• Add backup management functions to InfoBackup.

Documentation Improvements

• Add FAQ to the documentation.

• Use wal_level=replica in the documentation for PostgreSQL ≥ 9.6.

v2.14 — Bug Fix and Improvements

Released: 2019-05-20

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix segfault when process-max > 8 for archive-push/archive-get.

Core Improvements

• Bypass database checks when stanza-delete issued with force.

• Add configure script for improved multi-platform support.

Core Development

• Filter improvements. Only process next filter in IoFilterGroup when input buffer is full or flushing. Improve filter's notion of "done" to optimize filter processing.

• Improve performance of non-blocking reads by using maximum buffer size.

• Add storageInfoList() to get detailed info about all entries in a path.

• Allow storageInfo() to follow links.

• Allow StorageFileWrite to set user, group, and modification time.

• Add pathExists() to Storage object.

• Improve zero-length content handling in HttpClient object.

• Don't append strerror() to error message when errno is 0.

• Improve type safety of interfaces and drivers.

• Add --c option to request a C remote.

• Add common/macro.h for general-purpose macros.

• Add macros for object free functions.

• Various MemContext callback improvements.

• Various Buffer improvements.

• Simplify storage object names.

• Add ioWriteStr() and ioWriteStrLine().

• Add separate functions to encode/decode each JSON type.

• Add macros to create constant Buffer objects.

• Add missing httpUriEncode() in S3 request.

• Add unsigned int Variant type and update code to use it.

• Expose handle (file descriptor) from IoWrite when applicable.

• Add iniSave() and iniMove() to Ini object.

• Add *Save() functions to most Info objects.

• Extern infoHash() so it can be used by other modules.

• varNewKv() accepts a KeyValue object rather than creating one.

• Add constant for maximum buffer sizes required by cvt*() functions.

• Add true and false String constants.

• Refactor Ini interface to expose String values instead of Variant.

• Refactor main() as a switch() statement.

• Add cfgOptionUInt() and cfgOptionUInt64() and update code to use them.

• Improve log performance, simplify macros, rename logWill() to logAny().

• Improve coverage in perl/exec, config/config, and config/parse modules.

• Remove -Wswitch-enum compiler option.

• Error on multiple option alternate names and simplify help command.

• Use THROW_ON_SYS_ERROR*() to improve code coverage.

• Improve macros and coverage rules that were hiding missing coverage.

• Improve efficiency of FUNCTION_LOG*() macros.

Documentation Features

• Add user guides for CentOS/RHEL 6/7.

Documentation Development

• Automate coverage summary report generation.

• Add --out-preserve to preserve contents of output path.

• Restore index menu url default lost in b85e51d6.

Test Development

• Add harnessInfoChecksum/Z() to ease creation of test info files.

• Update containers with PostgreSQL minor releases and liblz4.

• Add testUser() and testGroup().

• Add build-max option to set max build processes.

• Reduce ScalityS3 processes since only two are needed.

• Update mock/expire module test matrix so expect tests output.

v2.13 — Bug Fixes

Released: 2019-04-18

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix zero-length reads causing problems for IO filters that did not expect them.

• Fix reliability of error reporting from local/remote processes.

• Fix Posix/CIFS error messages reporting the wrong filename on write/sync/close.

Core Development

• Harden IO filters against zero input and optimize zero output case.

• Move lockRelease() to the end of exitSafe().

• Add CHECK() macro for production assertions.

• Automatically generate constants for command and option names.

• Use a macro instead of a nested struct to create common String variables.

• Add STR() macro to create constant String objects from runtime strings.

• Add macros to create constant Variant types.

• Migrate backupRegExp() to C.

Documentation Development

• Option to build documentation from current apt.postgres.org packages.

v2.12 — C Implementation of Archive Push

Released: 2019-04-11

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix issues when a path option is / terminated.

• Fix issues when log-level-file=off is set for the archive-get command.

• Fix C code to recognize host:port option format like Perl does.

• Fix issues with remote/local command logging options.

Core Improvements

• The archive-push command is implemented entirely in C.

• Increase process-max limit to 999.

• Improve error message when an S3 bucket name contains dots.

Core Development

• Add separate archive-push-async command.

• CryptoHash improvements and fixes. Fix incorrect buffer size used in cryptoHashOne(). Add missing const to cryptoHashOne() and cryptoHashOneStr(). Add hash size constants. Extern hash type constant.

• Add CIFS storage driver.

• Add file write to the remote and S3 storage drivers.

• Add storageRepoWrite() and storagePg()/storagePgWrite() to storage helper.

• Use a single file to handle global errors in async archiving.

• Add document creation to XML objects.

• Remove redundant documentation from PostgreSQL interface files and clarify ambiguous function names.

• Add WAL info to PostgreSQL interface.

• Refactor PostgreSQL interface to remove most code duplication.

• Logging improvements. Allow three-digit process IDs in logging. Allow process id in C logging.

• Add process id to ProtocolParallelJob.

• Add process id to C archive-get and archive-push logging.

• Close log file before exec().

• Allow warnings to be written by archiveAsyncStatusOkWrite().

• Move WAL path prefix logic into walPath().

• Make notion of current PostgreSQL info ID in C align with Perl.

• Add locking capability to the remote command.

• Add forkSafe() to handle fork errors.

• Add httpHeaderDup().

• httpClientRequest() accepts a body parameter.

• Add protocolKeepAlive() to send noops to all remotes.

• Make strLstDup() null-tolerant.

• Add strLstMergeAnti() for merge anti-joins.

• Add cvtSSizeToZ() and debug macros.

• Remove unused infoArchiveCheckPg() function.

• Add constants for .ok/.error status extensions.

Documentation Improvements

• Clarify that S3-compatible object stores are supported.

Test Development

• Build test harness with the same warnings as code being tested.

• Add TEST_64BIT() macro to detect 64-bit platforms.

• Skip coverage for macros with numbers in their name.

• Use restore command for remote performances tests.

v2.11 — C Implementation of Archive Get

Released: 2019-03-11

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix possible truncated WAL segments when an error occurs mid-write.

• Fix info command missing WAL min/max when stanza specified.

• Fix non-compliant JSON for options passed from C to Perl.

Core Improvements

• The archive-get command is implemented entirely in C.

• Enable socket keep-alive on older Perl versions.

• Error when parameters are passed to a command that does not accept parameters.

• Add hints when unable to find a WAL segment in the archive.

• Improve error when hostname cannot be found in a certificate.

• Add additional options to backup.manifest for debugging purposes.

Core Development

• Migrate local and remote commands to C.

• Add separate archive-get-async command.

• Add ProtocolParallel* objects for parallelizing commands.

• Add ProtocolCommand object.

• Add exists() to remote storage.

• Resolve storage path expressions before passing to remote.

• Expose handle (file descriptor) from IoRead when applicable.

• Add storageHelperFree() to storage helper.

• Add kvKeyExists() to KeyValue object.

• Add lstRemove() to List object.

• Allow cfgExecParam() to exclude options.

• MemContext improvements. Improve performance of context and memory allocations. Use contextTop/contextCurrent instead of memContextTop()/memContextCurrent(). Don't make a copy of the context name.

• Make DESTDIR fully-configurable in the Makefile.

• Add note for CSTD settings on BSD variants.

• Add clean and uninstall targets to Makefile.

• Change execRead() to return a size_t.

• Prevent option warning from being output when running help command.

• Improve null-handling of strToLog() and varToLog().

• Increase per-call stack trace size to 4096.

• Move compress module to common/compress.

• Move crypto module to common/crypto.

Documentation Improvements

• Update default documentation version to PostgreSQL 10.

Documentation Development

• Add instructions for building the coverage report.

• Documentation builds on PostgreSQL 9.4-10.

Test Development

• Create test matrix for mock/archive, mock/archive-stop, mock/all, mock/expire, and mock/stanza to increase coverage and reduce tests.

• Improve fork harness to allow multiple children and setup pipes automatically.

• Reduce expect log level in mock/archive and mock/stanza tests.

• Rename test modules for consistency.

• Only run test-level stack trace by default for unit-tested modules.

• Add missing ToLog() coverage to String, List, and PgControl.

• Create aliases for test VMs ordered by age.

v2.10 — Bug Fixes

Released: 2019-02-09

Core Bug Fixes

• Add unimplemented S3 driver method required for archive-get.

• Fix check for improperly configured pg-path.

Core Development

• JSON improvements. Optimize parser implementation. Make the renderer more null tolerant.

• Automatically adjust db-timeout when protocol-timeout is smaller.

v2.09 — Minor Improvements and Bug Fixes

Released: 2019-01-30

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix issue with multiple async status files causing a hard error.

Core Improvements

• The info command is implemented entirely in C.

• Simplify info command text message when no stanzas are present. Replace the repository path with "the repository".

• Add _DARWIN_C_SOURCE flag to Makefile for MacOS builds.

• Update address lookup in C TLS client to use modern methods.

• Include Posix-compliant header for strcasecmp() and fd_set.

Core Development

• Add remote storage objects.

• Add ProtocolClient object and helper functions.

• Add Exec object.

• Add IoHandleRead and IoHandleWrite objects.

• Add cfgExecParam() to generate parameters for executing commands.

• Ignore SIGPIPE signals and check EPIPE result instead.

• Function log macro improvements. Rename FUNCTION_DEBUG_ and consolidate ASSERT_ macros for consistency. Improve CONST and P/PP type macro handling. Move MACRO_TO_STR() to common/debug.h. Remove unused type parameter from FUNCTION_TEST_RETURN().

• Make the C version of the info command conform to the Perl version.

• Improve accuracy of strSizeFormat().

• Add ioReadBuf() to easily read into a buffer.

• JSON improvements. Allow empty arrays in JSON parser. Fix null output in JSON renderer. Fix escaping in JSON string parser/renderer.

• Allocate extra space for concatenations in the String object.

• Return UnknownError from errorTypeFromCode() for invalid error codes.

• Update Perl repo rules to work when stanza is not specified.

• Update Storage::Local->list() to accept an undefined path.

• Null-terminate list returned by strLstPtr().

• Add kvMove() and varLstMove().

• Replace FileOpenError with HostConnectError in TlsClient.

• Allow string Variant objects to contain null.

• Rename common/io/handle module to common/io/handleWrite.

• Add const VariantList * debug type.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fix hard-coded repository path.

Documentation Improvements

• Clarify that encryption is always performed client-side.

• Add examples for building a documentation host.

• Allow if in manifest variables, lists, and list items.

Test Development

• Move C module include in test.c above headers included for testing.

• Allow primary gid for the test user to be different from uid.

• Increase timeout in storage/s3 module to improve reliability.

v2.08 — Minor Improvements and Bug Fixes

Released: 2019-01-02

Core Bug Fixes

• Remove request for S3 object info directly after putting it.

• Correct archive-get-queue-max to be size type.

• Add error message when current user uid/gid does not map to a name.

• Error when --target-action=shutdown specified for PostgreSQL < 9.5.

Core Improvements

• Set TCP keepalives on S3 connections.

• Reorder info command text output so most recent backup is output last.

• Change file ownership only when required.

• Redact authentication header when throwing S3 errors.

Core Development

• Enable S3 storage and encryption for archive-get command in C.

• Migrate local info command to C.

• Add S3 storage driver.

• Add HttpClient object.

• Add TlsClient object.

• Add interface objects for libxml2.

• Add encryption capability to Info* objects.

• Add IoFilter interface to CipherBlock object.

• Allow arbitrary InOut filters to be chained in IoFilterGroup.

• Add infoBackup object to encapsulate the backup.info file.

• Improve JSON to Variant conversion and add Variant to JSON conversion.

• Storage helper improvements. Allow NULL stanza in storage helper. Add path expression for repository backup.

• Info module improvements. Rename constants in Info module for consistency. Remove #define statements in the InfoPg module to conform with newly-adopted coding standards. Use cast to make for loop more readable in InfoPg module. Add infoArchiveIdHistoryMatch() to the InfoArchive object.

• Allow I/O read interface to explicitly request blocking reads.

• Improve error messages when info files are missing/corrupt.

• Add strSizeFormat() to String object.

• Add strLstInsert() and strLstInsertZ() to StringList object.

• Rename PGBACKREST/BACKREST constants to PROJECT.

• Require S3 key options except for local/remote commands.

• Explicitly compile with Posix 2001 standard.

• Add ServiceError for errors from a service that can be retried.

• Conditional compilation of Perl logic in exit.c.

• Merge cipher.h into crypto.h.

• Remove extraneous use/include statements.

• Remove embedded semicolon from String constant macros.

• Reduce debug level for infoIni() to test.

• Return IoFilterGroup * from ioFilterGroupAdd().

• Add coding standards for String constants.

• Add missing LOG_DEBUG() macro.

Documentation Improvements

• Clarify when target-action is effective and PostgreSQL version support.

• Clarify that region/endpoint must be configured correctly for the bucket.

• Add documentation for building the documentation.

Documentation Development

• Add admonitions to all documentation renderers (HTML, PDF, Markdown and help text) and update xml files accordingly.

• Add HTML table rendering and update PDF/Markdown renderers to support header-less tables. Add optional table captions.

• Escape special characters in latex when not in a code block.

• Base menu ordering on natural ordering in the manifest.

• Replace keywords with more flexible if statements.

• Pre-build containers for any execute elements marked pre.

• Documentation may be built with user-specified packages.

• Add Centos/RHEL 7 option to documentation build.

• Allow custom logo for PDF documentation.

• Modify general document elements to allow any child element.

• Use absolute paths so that ./doc.pl runs.

• Pick pg_switch_wal()/pg_switch_xlog() based on PostgreSQL version.

• Add configuration to the standby so it works as a primary when promoted.

• Create common if expressions for testing os-type.

• Add zlib1g-dev to Debian builds.

Test Development

• New test containers with static test certificates.

• Fix test binary name for gprof.

• Allow arbitrary multiplier and flush character in IoTestFilterMultiply.

• Update URL for Docker install.

• Add testRepoPath() to let C unit tests know where the code repository is located.

• Merge common/typeStringListTest module into common/typeStringTest.

• Merge common/typeVariantListTest module into common/typeVariantTest.

v2.07 — Automatic Backup Checksum Delta

Released: 2018-11-16

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix issue with archive-push-queue-max not being honored on connection error.

• Fix static WAL segment size used to determine if archive-push-queue-max has been exceeded.

• Fix error after log file open failure when processing should continue.

Core Features

• Automatically enable backup checksum delta when anomalies (e.g. timeline switch) are detected.

Core Improvements

• Retry all S3 5xx errors rather than just 500 internal errors.

Core Development

• Correct current history item in InfoPg to always be in position 0.

• Make ioReadLine() read less aggressively.

• Add ioWriteFlush() to flush pending output.

• Add destructors to IoRead and IoWrite objects.

• Add base variants to all integer to string conversion functions.

• Add lstInsert() to List object.

• Add strCatChr(), strEmpty(), and constant macros to String object.

• Add regExpPrefix() to aid in static prefix searches.

• Correct cfgDefDataFind() to use UINTP instead of VOIDPP.

• Change infoArchiveCheckPg() to display the PostgreSQL version as a string (e.g. 9.4) instead of the integer representation (e.g. 90400) when throwing an error.

• Allow storage path and file mode to be 0.

• Limit usable Buffer size without changing allocated size.

• Construct Wait object in milliseconds instead of fractional seconds.

• Add THROW*_ON_SYS_ERROR* macros to test and throw system errors.

• Add KernelError to report miscellaneous kernel errors.

• Use THROW_ON_SYS_ERROR macro to improve fork code coverage.

• Storage interface methods no longer declare the driver as const.

• Add memContextCallbackClear() to prevent double free() calls.

• Merge crypto/random module into crypto/crypto.

• Add cryptoError() and update crypto code to use it.

• Rename CipherError to CryptoError.

• Reword misleading message in stack trace when parameter buffer is full.

• Add logging macros for TimeMSec type.

• Modify value of PERL_EMBED_ERROR macro.

Documentation Development

• Add new HTML tags and strExtra to DocHtmlElement.

• Remove error suppression for pgBackRest make.

Test Development

• New test containers. Add libxml2 library needed for S3 development. Include new minor version upgrades for PostgreSQL. Remove PostgreSQL 11 beta/rc repository.

• Test speed improvements. Mount tmpfs in Vagrantfile instead test.pl. Preserve contents of C unit test build directory between test.pl executions. Improve efficiency of code generation.

• New, concise coverage report for C.

• Add TEST_LOG() and TEST_LOG_FMT() macros.

• Improve alignment of expected vs. actual error test results.

• Add time since the beginning of the run to each test statement.

v2.06 — Checksum Delta Backup and PostgreSQL 11 Support

Released: 2018-10-15

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix missing URI encoding in S3 driver.

• Fix incorrect error message for duplicate options in configuration files.

• Fix incorrectly reported error return in info logging. A return code of 1 from the archive-get was being logged as an error message at info level but otherwise worked correctly.

Core Features

• Add checksum delta for incremental backups. Checksum delta backups uses checksums rather than timestamps to determine if files have changed.

• PostgreSQL 11 support, including configurable WAL segment size.

Core Improvements

• Ignore all files in a linked tablespace directory except the subdirectory for the current version of PostgreSQL. Previously an error would be generated if other files were present and not owned by the PostgreSQL user.

• Improve info command to display the stanza cipher type.

• Improve support for special characters in filenames.

• Allow delta option to be specified in the pgBackRest configuration file.

Core Development

• Migrate local, unencrypted, non-S3 archive-get command to C.

• Storage refactoring. Posix file functions now differentiate between open and missing errors. Don't use negations in objects below Storage. Rename posix driver files/functions for consistency. Full abstraction of storage driver interface. Merge protocol storage helper into storage helper. Add CIFS driver to storage helper for read-only repositories.

• Update all interfaces to use variable parameter constructors.

• Info objects now parse JSON and use specified storage.

• Add ioReadLine()/ioWriteLine() to IoRead/IoWrite objects.

• Add helper for repository storage.

• Add cryptoHmacOne() for HMAC support.

• Add cfgDefOptionMulti() to identify multi-value options.

• Add bufNewZ() and bufHex() to Buffer object.

• Allow hashSize() to run on remote storage.

• Restore bIgnoreMissing flag in backupFile() lost in storage refactor.

• Migrate walIsPartial(), walIsSegment(), and walSegmentFind() from Perl to C.

• Migrate control functions to detect stop files to C.

• Make archive-get info messages consistent between C and Perl implementations.

• Change locking around async process forking to be more test friendly.

• Simplify debug logging by allowing log functions to return String objects.

• Improve documentation in filter.h and filter.internal.h.

Documentation Improvements

• Use command in authorized_hosts to improve SSH security.

• List allowable values for the buffer-size option in the configuration reference.

Documentation Development

• Update introduction to be pithy.

Test Development

• Install nodejs from deb.nodesource.com.

• Disable flapping archive/get unit on CentOS 6.

• Move test expect log out of the regular test directory.

• Fix buffer underrun in configuration test harness.

• Fix missing test caused by a misplaced YAML tag.

• Make Valgrind return an error even when a non-fatal issue is detected. Update some minor issues discovered in the tests as a result.

• Add -ftree-coalesce-vars option to unit test compilation.

• Clear test directory between test runs.

• Allow C or Perl coverage to run on more than one VM.

• Don't perform valgrind when requested.

• Remove compiler warnings that are not valid for u16.

• Merge all posix storage tests into a single unit.

• Add .gitignore to C src directory.

• Fix typo in unit test error messages, EXECTED => EXPECTED.

• Make comment blocks consistent across all tests.

v2.05 — Environment Variable Options and Exclude Temporary/Unlogged Relations

Released: 2018-08-31

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix issue where relative links in $PGDATA could be stored in the backup with the wrong path. This issue did not affect absolute links and relative tablespace links were caught by other checks.

• Remove incompletely implemented online option from the check command. Offline operation runs counter to the purpose of this command, which is to check if archiving and backups are working correctly.

• Fix issue where errors raised in C were not logged when called from Perl. pgBackRest properly terminated with the correct error code but lacked an error message to aid in debugging.

• Fix issue when a boolean option (e.g. delta) was specified more than once.

Core Features

• Allow any option to be set in an environment variable. This includes options that previously could only be specified on the command line, e.g. stanza, and secret options that could not be specified on the command-line, e.g. repo1-s3-key-secret.

• Exclude temporary and unlogged relation (table/index) files from backup. Implemented using the same logic as the patches adding this feature to PostgreSQL, 8694cc96 and 920a5e50. Temporary relation exclusion is enabled in PostgreSQL ≥ 9.0. Unlogged relation exclusion is enabled in PostgreSQL ≥ 9.1, where the feature was introduced.

• Allow arbitrary directories and/or files to be excluded from a backup. Misuse of this feature can lead to inconsistent backups so read the --exclude documentation carefully before using.

• Add log-subprocess option to allow file logging for local and remote subprocesses.

• PostgreSQL 11 Beta 3 support.

Core Improvements

• Allow zero-size files in backup manifest to reference a prior manifest regardless of timestamp delta.

• Improve asynchronous archive-get/archive-push performance by directly checking status files.

• Improve error message when a command is missing the stanza option.

Core Development

• Validate configuration options in a single pass. By pre-calculating and storing the option dependencies in parse.auto.c validation can be completed in a single pass, which is both simpler and faster.

• Add gzip compression/decompression filters for C.

• Improve performance of string to int conversion. Use strtoll() instead of sprintf() for conversion. Also use available integer min/max constants rather than hard-coded values.

• Add uint64 variant type and supporting conversion functions.

• Add basic C JSON parser.

• Migrate minimum set of code for reading archive.info files from Perl to C.

• Allow Buffer object "used size" to be different than "allocated size". Add functions to manage used size and remaining size and update automatically when possible.

• Abstract IO layer out of the storage layer. This allows the routines to be used for IO objects that do not have a storage representation. Implement buffer read and write IO objects. Implement filters and update cryptoHash to use the new interface. Implement size and buffer filters.

• storageFileRead() accepts a buffer for output rather than creating one. This is more efficient overall and allows the caller to specify how many bytes will be read on each call. Reads are appended if the buffer already contains data but the buffer size will never increase.

• Add iniSectionList() to Ini object and remove dead code.

• Manifest improvements. Require PostgreSQL catalog version when instantiating a Manifest object (and not loading it from disk). Prevent manifest from being built more than once. Limit manifest build recursion (i.e. links followed) to sixteen levels to detect link loops.

• Do nothing in memContextMove() when the context is already in the specified parent.

• Allow command/option constants to autonumber in both C and Perl to reduce churn when a new command/option is added.

• Show exact log level required for stack trace param output instead of just "debug".

• Update Archive::Info->archiveIdList() to return a valid error code instead of unknown.

• Add cvtBoolToConstZ() to simplify conversion of boolean to string.

• Add cvtZToUInt() to convert string to unsigned int.

• Enable -Wstrict-prototypes, -Wpointer-arith, -Wduplicated-branches, -Wvla, and -Wduplicated-cond and update code to conform where necessary.

• Rename error-handling variables in Main.pm to conform to standard.

• Remove redundant lines from embedded Perl by combining blank lines.

• Define cipher magic size with sizeof() rather than using a constant.

• Add cvtCharToZ() and macro for debugging char params.

• Add strReplaceChr() to String object.

• Correct OptionInvalidError to OptionInvalidValueError in boolean option parsing.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fix invalid log level in log-path option reference.

Documentation Improvements

• Stop trying to arrange contributors in release.xml by last/first name. Contributor names have always been presented in the release notes exactly as given, but we tried to assign internal IDs based on last/first name which can be hard to determine and ultimately doesn't make sense. Inspired by Christophe's PostgresOpen 2017 talk, "Human Beings Do Not Have a Primary Key".

Documentation Development

• Allow containers to be defined in a document. The defined containers are built before the document build begins which allows them to be reused.

• Move most host setup to containers defined in the documentation. This includes PostgreSQL installation which had previously been included in the documentation. This way produces faster builds and there is no need for us to document PostgreSQL installation.

Test Improvements

• Error if LibC build is performed outside the test environment. LibC is no longer required for production builds.

Test Development

• Use pre-built images from Docker Hub when the container definition has not changed. Downloading an image is quite a bit faster than building a new image from scratch and saves minutes per test run in CI.

• Refactor the common/log tests to not depend on common/harnessLog. common/harnessLog was not ideally suited for general testing and made all the tests quite awkward. Instead, move all code used to test the common/log module into the logTest module and repurpose common/harnessLog to do log expect testing for all other tests in a cleaner way. Add a few exceptions for config testing since the log levels are reset by default in config/parse.

• Add --log-level-test option. This allows setting the test log level independently from the general test harness setting, but current only works for the C tests. It is useful for seeing log output from functions on the console while a test is running.

• Improve error reporting for TEST_ASSIGN() and TEST_RESULT_VOID() macros.

• Update code count for new file types and exclusions.

v2.04 — Critical Bug Fix for Backup Resume

Released: 2018-07-05

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix critical bug in resume that resulted in inconsistent backups. A regression in v0.82 removed the timestamp comparison when deciding which files from the aborted backup to keep on resume. See note above for more details.

• Fix error in selective restore when only one user database exists in the cluster.

• Fix non-compliant ISO-8601 timestamp format in S3 authorization headers. AWS and some gateways were tolerant of space rather than zero-padded hours while others were not.

Core Features

• PostgreSQL 11 Beta 2 support.

Core Improvements

• Improve the HTTP client to set content-length to 0 when not specified by the server. S3 (and gateways) always set content-length or transfer-encoding but HTTP 1.1 does not require it and proxies (e.g. HAProxy) may not include either.

• Set search_path = 'pg_catalog' on PostgreSQL connections.

Core Development

• Move cryptographic hash functions to C using OpenSSL.

• Split log levels into separate header file. Many modules that use debug.h do not need to do logging so this reduces dependencies for those modules.

• Auto-generate Makefile with dependencies.

• Rename cipher module to the more general crypto.

• Update Debian package to add debug symbols to pgBackRest executable.

• Convert the not very portable uint type to unsigned int.

Documentation Improvements

• Create a new section to describe building pgBackRest and build on a separate host.

• Add sample S3 policy to restrict bucket privileges.

Documentation Development

• Fix default location of pgbackrest.conf in option reference.

• Preliminary documentation for PostgreSQL 11 unprivileged user backup.

• Remove call to lscpu which can vary widely by build host.

• Build containers from scratch for more accurate testing. Use a prebuilt s3 server container.

• Document generator improvements. Allow parameters to be passed when a container is created. Allow /etc/hosts update to be skipped (for containers without bash). Allow environment load to be skipped. Allow bash wrapping to be skipped. Allow forcing a command to run as a user without sudo. Allow an entire execute list to be hidden.

Test Development

• Add zero-length file to mock/all test.

• Update primary test environment (Vagrant and Docker) to Ubuntu 18.04.

• Improve efficiency of C library builds now that they are used only for testing.

• Remove RHEL and Debian package patches since they have been committed upstream.

• Update parameters for VBoxService start.

• Make ls ordering deterministic in mock/all test.

v2.03 — Single Executable to Deploy

Released: 2018-05-22

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix potential buffer overrun in error message handling.

• Fix archive write lock being taken for the synchronous archive-get command.

Core Improvements

• Embed exported C functions and Perl modules directly into the pgBackRest executable.

• Use time_t instead of __time_t for better portability.

• Print total runtime in milliseconds at command end.

Core Development

• Add stack trace macros to all functions. Low-level functions only include stack trace in test builds while higher-level functions ship with stack trace built-in. Stack traces include all parameters passed to the function but production builds only create the parameter list when the log level is set high enough, i.e. debug or trace depending on the function.

• Build libc using links rather than referencing the C files in src directly. The C library builds with different options which should not be reused for the C binary or vice versa.

Test Development

• Test harness improvements. Allow more than one test to provide coverage for the same module. Add option to disable valgrind. Add option to disabled coverage. Add option to disable debug build. Add option to disable compiler optimization. Add --dev-test mode.

• Update SSL error message test on CentOS 7.

• Set log-timestamp=n for integration tests. This means less filtering of logs needs to be done and new timestamps can be added without adding new filters.

v2.02 — Parallel Asynchronous Archive Get and Configuration Includes

Released: 2018-05-06

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix directory syncs running recursively when only the specified directory should be synced.

• Fix archive-copy throwing "path not found" error for incr/diff backups.

• Fix failure in manifest build when two or more files in PGDATA are linked to the same directory.

• Fix delta restore failing when a linked file is missing.

• Fix rendering of key/value and list options in help.

Core Features

• Add asynchronous, parallel archive-get. This feature maintains a queue of WAL segments to help reduce latency when PostgreSQL requests a WAL segment with restore_command.

• Add support for additional pgBackRest configuration files. The directory is specified by the --config-include-path option. Add --config-path option for overriding the default base path of the --config and --config-include-path option.

• Add repo-s3-token option to allow temporary credentials tokens to be configured. pgBackRest currently has no way to request new credentials so the entire command (e.g. backup, restore) must complete before the credentials expire.

Core Improvements

• Update the archive-push-queue-max, manifest-save-threshold, and buffer-size options to accept values in KB, MB, GB, TB, or PB where the multiplier is a power of 1024.

• Make backup/restore path sync more efficient. Scanning the entire directory can be very expensive if there are a lot of small tables. The backup manifest contains the path list so use it to perform syncs instead of scanning the backup/restore path.

• Show command parameters as well as command options in initial info log message.

• Rename archive-queue-max option to archive-push-queue-max. This is consistent with the new archive-get-queue-max option. The old option name will continue to be accepted.

Core Development

• Make backup.history sync more efficient. Only the backup.history/[year] directory was being synced, so check if the backup.history is newly created and sync it as well.

• Move async forking and more error handling to C. The Perl process was exiting directly when called but that interfered with proper locking for the forked async process. Now Perl returns results to the C process which handles all errors, including signals.

• Improved lock implementation written in C. Now only two types of locks can be taken: archive and backup. Most commands use one or the other but the stanza-* commands acquire both locks. This provides better protection than the old command-based locking scheme.

• Storage object improvements. Convert all functions to variadic functions. Enforce read-only storage. Add storageLocalWrite() helper function. Add storageCopy(), storageExists(), storageMove(), storageNewRead()/storageNewWrite(), storagePathCreate(), storagePathRemove(), storagePathSync(), and storageRemove(). Add StorageFileRead and StorageFileWrite objects. Abstract Posix driver code into a separate module. Call storagePathRemove() from the Perl Posix driver.

• Improve String and StringList objects. Add strUpper(), strLower(), strLstExists(), strLstExistsZ(), strChr(), strSub(), strSubN(), and strTrunc().

• Improve Buffer object. Add bufNewC(), bufEq() and bufCat(). Only reallocate buffer when the size has changed.

• Add pgControlInfo() to read pg_control and determine the PostgreSQL version.

• Add walSegmentNext() and walSegmentRange().

• Error handling improvements. Add THROWP_* macro variants for error handling. These macros allow an ErrorType pointer to be passed and are required for functions that may return different errors based on a parameter. Add _FMT variants for all THROW macros so format types are checked by the compiler.

• Split cfgLoad() into multiple functions to make testing easier. Mainly this helps with unit tests that need to do log expect testing.

• Allow MemContext objects to be copied to a new parent. This makes it easier to create objects and then copy them to another context when they are complete without having to worry about freeing them on error. Update List, StringList, and Buffer to allow moves. Update Ini and Storage to take advantage of moves.

• Full branch coverage in C code.

• Refactor usec to msec in common/time.c. The implementation provides usec resolution but this is not needed in practice and it makes the interface more complicated due to the extra zeros.

• Replace THROW_ON_SYS_ERROR() with THROW_SYS_ERROR(). The former macro was hiding missing branch coverage for critical error handling.

• Start work on C handle io object and use it to output help.

• Don't copy CFGDEF_NAME_ALT or CFGDEF_INHERIT when processing config option inheritance.

• Split debug and assert code into separate headers. Assert can be used earlier because it only depends on the error-handler and not logging. Add ASSERT() macro which is preserved in production builds.

• Cleanup C types. Remove typec.h. Order all typdefs above local includes.

• Fix header exclusion defines that do not match the general pattern.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Update docs with 32-bit support and caveats. 32-bit support was added in v1.26.

Documentation Improvements

• Add monitoring examples using PostgreSQL and jq.

• Add example of command section usage to archiving configuration.

• Remove documentation describing info --output=json as experimental.

• Update out-of-date description for the spool-path option.

Documentation Development

• Add logic to find the real oid of the test1 database during restore testing.

• Document build improvements. Perform apt-get update to ensure packages are up to date before installing. Add -p to the repository mkdir so it won't fail if the directory already exists, handy for testing packages.

Test Features

• Use lcov for C unit test coverage reporting. Switch from Devel::Cover because it would not report on branch coverage for reports converted from gcov. Incomplete branch coverage for a module now generates an error. Coverage of unit tests is not displayed in the report unless they are incomplete for either statement or branch coverage.

Test Development

• Move test definitions to test/define.yaml. The location is better because it is no longer buried in the Perl test libs. Also, the data can be easily accessed from C.

• Move help/version integration tests to mock/all. Help and version are covered by unit tests, so we really just to need to make sure there is output when called from the command line.

• Move archive-stop and expire tests to the mock module. These are mock integration tests so they should be grouped with the other mock integration tests.

• Add harnessCfgLoad() test function, which allows a new config to be loaded for unit testing without resetting log functions, opening a log file, or taking locks.

• Add HARNESS_FORK macros for tests that require fork(). A standard pattern for tests makes fork() easier to use and should help prevent some common mistakes.

• Add TEST_ERROR_FMT macro to simplify testing of formatted error messages.

• Generate code counts for all source files. The source files are also classified by type and purpose.

• Include VM type in gcov path to avoid conflicts between VMs with different architectures.

• Improve logic for smart builds to include version changes. Skip version checks when testing in --dev mode.

• Use pip 9.03 in test VMs. pip 10 drops support for Python 2.6 which is still used by the older test VMs.

• Allow -DDEBUG_UNIT to be suppressed to test how debug macros behave.

• Rename Perl tests so they don't conflict with their C counterparts.

• Divide tests into three types (unit, integration, performance). Many options that were set per test can instead be inferred from the types, i.e. container, c, expect, and individual.

• Try tweaking time sync settings to prevent clock drift rather than restarting VBoxService on every test run.

v2.01 — Minor Bug Fixes and Improvements

Released: 2018-03-19

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix --target-action and --recovery-option options being reported as invalid when restoring with --type=immediate.

• Immediately error when a secure option (e.g. repo1-s3-key) is passed on the command line. Since pgBackRest would not pass secure options on to sub-processes an obscure error was thrown. The new error is much clearer and provides hints about how to fix the problem. Update command documentation to omit secure options that cannot be specified on the command-line.

• Fix issue passing --no-config to embedded Perl.

• Fix issue where specifying log-level-stderr > warn would cause a local/remote process to error on exit due to output found on stderr when none was expected. The max value for a local/remote process is now error since there is no reason for these processes to emit warnings.

• Fix manifest test in the check command when tablespaces are present.

Core Improvements

• Error when multiple arguments are set in the config file for an option that does not accept multiple arguments.

• Remove extraneous sudo commands from src/Makefile.

Core Development

• Improve Perl configuration. Set config before Main::main() call to avoid secrets being exposed in a stack trace. Move logic for setting defaults to C.

• Improve logging. Move command begin to C except when it must be called after another command in Perl (e.g. expire after backup). Command begin logs correctly for complex data types like hash and list. Specify which commands will log to file immediately and set the default log level for log messages that are common to all commands. File logging is initiated from C.

• Port most of Config::Config::configLoad() from Perl to C.

• Fix incorrect enum types in config.c that throw warnings under clang.

• Enable -Wswitch-enum, -Wconversion, -Wformat=2, -Wformat-nonliteral, and -Wformat-signedness and silence new warnings.

• Improve code documentation in config module.

• Improve debugging. Add ASSERT_DEBUG() macro for debugging and replace all current assert() calls except in tests that can't use the debug code. Replace remaining NDEBUG blocks with the more granular DEBUG_UNIT. Remove some debug memset() calls in MemContext since valgrind is more useful for these checks.

• Add cfgOptionTest() and update cfgOption() calls that are better implemented as cfgOptionTest().

• Build with -DNDEBUG by default but disable for testing.

• Check int size in common/type.h. This ensures that integers are at least 32-bits without having to run the test suite.

• Improve conversion of C exceptions to Exception objects. Colons in the message would prevent all of the message from being loaded into the Exception object.

Documentation Improvements

• Show index in examples for indexed options, i.e. repo-*, pg-*.

• Simplify table of contents on command page by only listing commands.

• Remove references to the C library being optional.

Test Features

• Add CentOS/RHEL package builds.

• Use clang for static code analysis. Nothing found initially except for some functions that should have been marked __noreturn__.

Test Development

• Build performance improvements. Improve bin and libc build performance. Improve code generation performance.

• Config test code writes secure options to a file instead of passing on the command-line.

• Disable console display of coverage for C files since Devel::Cover does not handle it well.

• Add new test for Common::Io::Process to show that output on stderr will raise an exception on close() even if the exit code is 0.

• Update pip before installing awscli.

• Remove --smart from --expect tests. This ensures that new binaries are built before running the tests.

• Remove Debian package patch now that it has been merged upstream.

v2.00 — Performance Improvements for Archive Push

Released: 2018-02-23

Core Features

• The archive-push command is now partially coded in C which allows the PostgreSQL archive_command to run significantly faster when processing status messages from the asynchronous archive process.

Core Improvements

• Improve check command to verify that the backup manifest can be built.

• Improve performance of HTTPS client. Buffering now takes the pending bytes on the socket into account (when present) rather than relying entirely on select(). In some instances the final bytes would not be flushed until the connection was closed.

• Improve S3 delete performance. The constant S3_BATCH_MAX had been replaced with a hard-coded value of 2, probably during testing.

• Allow any non-command-line option to be reset to default on the command-line. This allows options in pgbackrest.conf to be reset to default which reduces the need to write new configuration files for specific needs.

• The C library is now required. This eliminates conditional loading and eases development of new library features.

• The pgbackrest executable is now a C binary instead of Perl. This allows certain time-critical commands (like async archive-push) to run more quickly.

• Rename db-* options to pg-* and backup-* options to repo-* to improve consistency. repo-* options are now indexed although currently only one is allowed.

Core Development

• Implement help command in C.

• Implement version command in C.

• Config parsing implemented in C and passed to Perl as JSON.

• Add Buffer, Ini, KeyValue, List, RegExp, Storage, String, StringList, Variant, VariantList, and Wait objects.

• Add command, exit, log, and time modules.

• Remove deprecated archive-max-mb option.

• Improve MemContext module. Add temporary context blocks and refactor allocation arrays to include allocation size.

• Improve error module. Add functions to convert error codes to C errors and handle system errors.

• Create a master list of errors in build/error.yaml. The C and Perl errors lists are created automatically by Build.pm so they stay up to date.

• Move lock release later in exitSafe() to reduce the chance of a new process starting and acquiring a lock before the old process has exited.

• Add 30 second wait loop to lockAcquire() when fail on no lock enabled. This should help prevent processes that are shutting down from interfering with processes that are starting up.

• Replace cfgCommandTotal()/cfgOptionTotal() functions with constants. The constants are applicable in more cases and allow the compiler to optimize certain loops more efficiently.

• Cleanup usage of internal options. Apply internal to options that need to be read to determine locality but should not appear in the help.

• Refactor code to make valgrind happy.

• Fix non-compliant formatting for function declarations.

Documentation Features

• All clusters in the documentation are initialized with checksums.

Documentation Improvements

• List deprecated option names in documentation and command-line help.

• Clarify that S3 buckets must be created by the user.

Documentation Development

• Add coding standards document.

• Improve section source feature to not require a title or content. The title will be pulled from the source document.

• Allow code blocks to have a type. Currently this is only rendered in Markdown.

• Add table render for Markdown format.

• PDF rendering improvements. Check both doc-path and bin-path for logo. Allow PDF to be output to a location other than the output directory. Use PDF-specific version variable for more flexible formatting. Allow sections to be excluded from table of contents. More flexible replacements for titles and footers. Fill is now the default for table columns. Column width is specified as a percentage rather that using latex-specific notation. Fix missing variable replace for code-block title.

• Add id param for hosts created with host-add. The host-*-ip variable is created from the id param so the name param can be changed without affecting the host-*-ip variable. If id is not specified then it is copied from name.

• Deploy historical documentation to prior rather than the root directory.

Test Development

• Run valgrind on all C unit tests.

• Only build C binary/library for Perl unit/integration tests or C unit tests that require Perl.

• Improve speed of C unit tests. Preserve object files between tests and use a Makefile to avoid rebuilding object files.

• Report coverage errors via the console. This helps with debugging coverage issues on remote services like Travis.

• No longer run master branch through CI. The integration branch will be run through CI and then pushed to master with github status checks.

• Rename Perl tests so they don't conflict with their C counterparts.

• Update URL for Debian package repository.

v1.29 — Critical Bug Fix for Backup Resume

Released: 2018-07-05

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix critical bug in resume that resulted in inconsistent backups. A regression in v0.82 removed the timestamp comparison when deciding which files from the aborted backup to keep on resume. See note above for more details.

• Fix non-compliant ISO-8601 timestamp format in S3 authorization headers. AWS and some gateways were tolerant of space rather than zero-padded hours while others were not.

• Fix directory syncs running recursively when only the specified directory should be synced.

• Fix --target-action and --recovery-option options being reported as invalid when restoring with --type=immediate.

• Fix archive-copy throwing "path not found" error for incr/diff backups.

• Fix failure in manifest build when two or more files in PGDATA are linked to the same directory.

• Fix delta restore failing when a linked file was missing.

• Fix error in selective restore when only one user database exists in the cluster.

Core Improvements

• Improve the HTTP client to set content-length to 0 when not specified by the server. S3 (and gateways) always set content-length or transfer-encoding but HTTP 1.1 does not require it and proxies (e.g. HAProxy) may not include either.

• Improve performance of HTTPS client. Buffering now takes the pending bytes on the socket into account (when present) rather than relying entirely on select(). In some instances the final bytes would not be flushed until the connection was closed.

• Improve S3 delete performance. The constant S3_BATCH_MAX had been replaced with a hard-coded value of 2, probably during testing.

• Make backup/restore path sync more efficient. Scanning the entire directory can be very expensive if there are a lot of small tables. The backup manifest contains the path list so use it to perform syncs instead of scanning the backup/restore path. Remove recursive path sync functionality since it is no longer used.

Core Development

• Make backup.history sync more efficient. Only the backup.history/[year] directory was being synced, so check if the backup.history is newly created and sync it as well.

• Add log-level-stderr option for stanza-* commands.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Update docs with 32-bit support and caveats. 32-bit support was added in v1.26.

Documentation Improvements

• Clarify that S3 buckets must be created by the user.

• Update out-of-date description for the spool-path option.

Documentation Development

• Remove call to lscpu which can vary widely by build host.

Test Development

• Add new test for Common::Io::Process to show that output on stderr will raise an exception on close() even if the exit code is 0.

• Add zero-length file to mock/all test.

• Disable package build tests since v1 will no longer be packaged. Users installing packages should update to v2. v1 builds are intended for users installing from source.

• Update SSL error message test on CentOS 7.

• Update URL for Debian package repository.

• Make ls ordering deterministic in mock/all test.

• Change backup test user from backrest to pgbackrest.

v1.28 — Stanza Delete

Released: 2018-02-01

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed inability to restore a single database contained in a tablespace using --db-include.

• Ensure latest db-id is selected on when matching archive.info to backup.info. This provides correct matching in the event there are system-id and db-version duplicates (e.g. after reverting a pg_upgrade).

• Fixed overly chatty error message when reporting an invalid command.

Core Features

• Add stanza-delete command to cleanup unused stanzas.

Core Improvements

• Improve stanza-create command so that it does not error when the stanza already exists.

Core Development

• Minor changes to Manifest module, mostly for test reproducibility.

• Fix non-compliant formatting for function declarations.

Documentation Improvements

• Update stanza-create --force documentation to urge caution when using.

Test Development

• Add unit tests for the Manifest module.

v1.27 — Bug Fixes and Documentation

Released: 2017-12-19

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that suppressed locality errors for backup and restore. When a backup host is present, backups should only be allowed on the backup host and restores should only be allowed on the database host unless an alternate configuration is created that ignores the remote host.

• Fixed an issue where WAL was not expired on PostgreSQL 10. This was caused by a faulty regex that expected all PostgreSQL major versions to be X.X.

• Fixed an issue where the --no-config option was not passed to child processes. This meant the child processes would still read the local config file and possibly cause unexpected behaviors.

• Fixed info command to eliminate "db (prior)" output if no backups or archives exist for a prior version of the cluster.

Core Development

• Add memGrowRaw() to memory context module.

Documentation Features

• Document the relationship between the archive-copy and archive-check options.

• Improve archive-copy reference documentation.

Documentation Development

• Relax permissions set by release.pl.

• Split "refactor" sections into "improvements" and "development" in the release notes. Many development notes are not relevant to users and simply clutter the release notes, so they are no longer shown on the website.

• Allow internal options that do not show up in the documentation. Used for test options initially but other use cases are on the horizon.

Test Development

• Update CI branches to release/1 and release/1-integration.

• No longer run release/1 branch through CI. The release/1-integration branch will be run through CI and then pushed to release/1 with github status checks.

• Move restore test infrastructure to HostBackup.pm. Required to test restores on the backup server, a fairly common scenario. Improve the restore function to accept optional parameters rather than a long list of parameters. In passing, clean up extraneous use of strType and strComment variables.

• Sync time to prevent build failures when running on VirtualBox.

v1.26 — Repository Encryption

Released: 2017-11-21

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that could cause copying large manifests to fail during restore.

• Fixed incorrect WAL offset for 32-bit architectures.

• Fixed an issue retrieving WAL for old database versions. After a stanza-upgrade it should still be possible to restore backups from the previous version and perform recovery with archive-get. However, archive-get only checked the most recent db version/id and failed. Also clean up some issues when the same db version/id appears multiple times in the history.

• Fixed an issue with invalid backup groups being set correctly on restore. If the backup cannot map a group to a name it stores the group in the manifest as false then uses either the owner of $PGDATA to set the group during restore or failing that the group of the current user. This logic was not working correctly because the selected group was overwriting the user on restore leaving the group undefined and the user incorrectly set to the group.

• Fixed an issue passing parameters to remotes. When more than one db was specified the path, port, and socket path would for db1 were passed no matter which db was actually being addressed.

Core Features

• Repository encryption support.

Core Improvements

• Disable gzip filter when --compress-level-network=0. The filter was used with compress level set to 0 which added overhead without any benefit.

• Inflate performance improvement for gzip filter.

Core Development

• Refactor protocol param generation into a new function. This allows the code to be tested more precisely and doesn't require executing a remote process.

• Add list type for options. The hash type was being used for lists with an additional flag (value-hash) to indicate that it was not really a hash.

• Remove configurable option hints. db-path was the only option with a hint so the feature seemed wasteful. All missing stanza options now output the same hint without needing configuration.

• Convert configuration definitions from auto-generated functions to auto-generated data structures.

• Add eof to S3 file driver (required for encryption support).

• Enable additional warnings for C builds.

• Simplify try..catch..finally names. Also wrap in a do...while loop to make sure that no random else is attached to the main if block.

• Improve base64 implementation. Different encoded strings could be generated based on compiler optimizations. Even though decoding was still successful the encoded strings did not match the standard.

• Disable -Wclobber compiler warning because it is mostly useless but keep the rest of -Wextra.

Documentation Features

• Add template to improve initial information gathered for issue submissions.

Documentation Improvements

• Clarify usage of the archive-timeout option and describe how it is distinct from the PostgreSQL archive_timeout setting.

Documentation Development

• Update release.pl to push data to site repository.

Test Features

• Automated tests for 32-bit i386/i686 architecture.

Test Development

• Update Debian/Ubuntu containers to download latest version of pip.

• Full unit test coverage for gzip filter.

• Only check expect logs on CentOS 7. Variations in distros cause false negatives in tests but don't add much value.

• Fix flapping protocol timeout test. It only matters that the correct error code is returned, so disable logging to prevent message ordering from failing the expect test.

• Designate a single distro (Ubuntu 16.04) for coverage testing. Running coverage testing on multiple distros takes time but doesn't add significant value. Also ensure that the distro designated to run coverage tests is one of the default test distros. For C tests, enable optimizations on the distros that don't do coverage testing.

• Automate generation of WAL and pg_control test files. The existing static files would not work with 32-bit or big-endian systems so create functions to generate these files dynamically rather than creating a bunch of new static files.

• Refactor C unit test macros so they compile with -Wstrict-aliasing.

• Refactor C page checksum unit test to compile with -Wstrict-aliasing.

v1.25 — S3 Performance Improvements

Released: 2017-10-24

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix custom settings for compress-level option being ignored.

• Remove error when overlapping timelines are detected. Overlapping timelines are valid in many Point-in-Time-Recovery (PITR) scenarios.

• Fix instances where database-id was not rendered as an integer in JSON info output.

Core Features

• Improve performance of list requests on S3. Any beginning literal portion of a filter expression is used to generate a search prefix which often helps keep the request small enough to avoid rate limiting.

Core Development

• Improve protocol error handling. In particular, "stop" errors are no longer reported as "unexpected".

• Allow functions with sensitive options to be logged at debug level with redactions. Previously, functions with sensitive options had to be logged at trace level to avoid exposing them. Trace level logging may still expose secrets so use with caution.

• Replace dynamically built class hierarchies in I/O layer with fixed parent() calls.

• Improve labeling for errors in helper processes.

• Update C naming conventions.

• Use int datatype wherever possible.

• Better separation of C source from Perl interface.

• Add LibC.template.pm to simplify LibC module generation.

• Add C error handler.

• Perl error handler recognizes errors thrown from the C library.

• Page checksum module uses new C error handler.

• Add C memory contexts.

• Add base64 encode/decode.

Test Features

• Add I/O performance tests.

Test Development

• Add C unit test infrastructure.

• Add test macros for C results and errors.

• Warnings in C builds treated as errors.

• Run all tests on tempfs rather than local disk.

• Improve performance of test code. Wait when all tests have been assigned to reduce CPU load.

• Remove Debian test repo after PostgreSQL 10 release.

• Convert config and page checksum tests into C unit tests.

• Add PostgreSQL versions to Debian VMs for testing.

v1.24 — New Backup Exclusions

Released: 2017-09-28

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where warnings were being emitted in place of lower priority log messages during backup from standby initialization.

• Fixed an issue where some db-* options (e.g. db-port) were not being passed to remotes.

Core Features

• Exclude contents of pg_snapshots, pg_serial, pg_notify, and pg_dynshmem from backup since they are rebuilt on startup.

• Exclude pg_internal.init files from backup since they are rebuilt on startup.

Core Improvements

• Open log file after async process is completely separated from the main process to prevent the main process from also logging to the file.

Core Development

• Dynamically generate list of files for C library build.

• Break up LibC.xs into separate module files.

Documentation Features

• Add passwordless SSH configuration.

Documentation Improvements

• Rename master to primary in documentation to align with PostgreSQL convention.

Documentation Development

• Add full installation where required and remove doc containers that included parts of the installation.

Test Development

• Improve C library smart build by ignoring changes outside of /lib/pgBackRest/Config.

v1.23 — Multiple Standbys and PostgreSQL 10 Support

Released: 2017-09-03

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that could cause compression to abort on growing files.

• Fixed an issue with keep-alives not being sent to the remote from the local process.

Core Features

• Up to seven standbys can be configured for backup from standby.

• PostgreSQL 10 support.

• Allow content-length (in addition to chunked encoding) when reading XML data to improve compatibility with third-party S3 gateways.

Core Improvements

• Increase HTTP timeout for S3.

• Add HTTP retries to harden against transient S3 network errors.

Core Development

• Configuration definitions are now pulled from the C library when present.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fixed document generation to include section summaries on the Configuration page.

Documentation Development

• Move contributor list to the end of release.xml for convenience.

Test Development

• Change log test order to ignore unimportant log errors while shutting down PostgreSQL.

• Drain stderr during test process execution as well as termination to prevent lockups if there is a lot of output.

• Update Docker build in Vagrantfile.

• Update containers to support C library builds in the documentation.

• Simplify smart logic for C Library and package builds.

v1.22 — Fixed S3 Retry

Released: 2017-08-09

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed authentication issue in S3 retry.

v1.21 — Improved Info Output and SSH Port Option

Released: 2017-08-08

Core Bug Fixes

• The archive_status directory is now recreated on restore to support PostgreSQL 8.3 which does not recreate it automatically like more recent versions do.

• Fixed an issue that could cause the empty archive directory for an old PostgreSQL version to be left behind after a stanza-upgrade.

Core Features

• Modified the info command (both text and JSON output) to display the archive ID and minimum/maximum WAL currently present in the archive for the current and prior, if any, database cluster version.

• Added --backup-ssh-port and --db-ssh-port options to support non-default SSH ports.

Core Improvements

• Retry when S3 returns an internal error (500).

Core Development

• Add bIgnoreMissing parameter to Local->manifest().

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fix description of --online based on the command context.

Documentation Features

• Add creation of /etc/pgbackrest.conf to manual installation instructions.

Documentation Improvements

• Move repository options into a separate section in command/command-line help.

Documentation Development

• Reduce log verbosity when building documentation by only logging sections that contain an execute list directly or in a child section.

• Debian/Ubuntu documentation now builds on Ubuntu 16.

• Remove vestigial repository options from backup command.

Test Development

• Fix log checking after PostgreSQL shuts down to include FATAL messages and disallow immediate shutdowns which can throw FATAL errors in the log.

• Use Google DNS in test environment for consistency.

• Use new Travis Trusty image.

• Generate global fake cert in containers for testing.

• Consolidate stanza-create and stanza-upgrade tests into new stanza test.

v1.20 — Critical 8.3/8.4 Bug Fix

Released: 2017-06-27

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that prevented tablespaces from being backed up on PostgreSQL ≤ 8.4.

• Fixed missing flag in C library build that resulted in a mismatched binary on 32-bit systems.

Core Features

• Add s3-repo-ca-path and s3-repo-ca-file options to accommodate systems where CAs are not automatically found by IO::Socket::SSL, i.e. RHEL7, or to load custom CAs.

Core Development

• Harden protocol handshake to handle race conditions.

• Fixed misleading error message when a file was opened for write in a missing directory.

• Change log level of hardlink logging to detail.

• Cast size in S3 manifest to integer.

• Rename Archive modules to remove redundancy.

• Improve S3 error reporting.

• Minor optimizations to package loads and ordering for archive-get and archive-push commands.

Documentation Development

• Remove exhaustive version list from Stable Releases TOC.

• Improve S3 server implementation in documentation.

• Update CentOS 6 documentation to build on PostgreSQL 9.5.

• Remove mount from host cache-key because it can vary by system.

Test Features

• Add documentation builds to CI.

Test Development

• Fix timeouts in ExecuteTest to speed multi-process testing.

• Remove patch directory before Debian package builds.

• Combine hardlink and non/compressed in synthetic tests to reduce test time and improve coverage.

• Split full module into mock and real to allow better test combinations and save time in CI.

• Consolidate archive-push and archive-get tests into new archive test.

• Eliminate redundancy in real tests.

• Install sudo in base containers rather than on demand.

• More optimized container suite that greatly improves build time.

• Added static Debian packages for Devel::Cover to reduce build time.

• Add deprecated state for containers. Deprecated containers may only be used to build packages.

• Remove Debian 8 from CI because it does not provide additional coverage over Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04, 16.04.

• Add Debian 9 to test suite.

• Remove process-max option. Parallelism is now tested in a more targeted manner and the high level option is no longer needed.

• Balance database versions between VMs to minimize test duration.

• Automatically check that all supported PostgreSQL versions are being tested on a single default VM.

• Add performance module and basic performance test for archive-push.

v1.19 — S3 Support

Released: 2017-06-12

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed the info command so the WAL archive min/max displayed is for the current database version.

• Fixed the backup command so the backup-standby option is reset (and the backup proceeds on the primary) if the standby is not configured and/or reachable.

• Fixed config warnings raised from a remote process causing errors in the master process.

Core Features

• Amazon S3 repository support.

Core Development

• Refactor storage layer to allow for new repository filesystems using drivers.

• Refactor IO layer to allow for new compression formats, checksum types, and other capabilities using filters.

• Move modules in Protocol directory in subdirectories.

• Move backup modules into Backup directory.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Changed invalid max-archive-mb option in configuration reference to archive-queue-max.

• Fixed missing sudo in installation section.

Test Development

• Fixed an undefined variable when a module had no uncoverable code exceptions.

• Fixed issue with --dry-run requiring --vm-out to work properly.

• Moved test and env modules to new directories to avoid namespace conflicts with common tests.

• Set --vm-max=2 for CI.

• Remove flapping protocol timeout test that will be replaced in the upcoming storage patch.

v1.18 — Stanza Upgrade, Refactoring, and Locking Improvements

Released: 2017-04-12

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where read-only operations that used local worker processes (i.e. restore) were creating write locks that could interfere with parallel archive-push.

Core Features

• Added the stanza-upgrade command to provide a mechanism for upgrading a stanza after upgrading to a new major version of PostgreSQL.

• Added validation of pgbackrest.conf to display warnings if options are not valid or are not in the correct section.

Core Improvements

• Simplify locking scheme. Now, only the master process will hold write locks (for archive-push and backup commands) and not all local and remote worker processes as before.

• Do not set timestamps of files in the backup directories to match timestamps in the cluster directory. This was originally done to enable backup resume, but that process is now implemented with checksums.

• Improved error message when the restore command detects the presence of postmaster.pid.

• Renumber return codes between 25 and 125 to avoid PostgreSQL interpreting some as fatal signal exceptions.

Core Development

• Refactor Ini.pm to facilitate testing.

• The backup and restore commands no longer copy via temp files. In both cases the files are checksummed on resume so there's no danger of partial copies.

• Allow functions to accept optional parameters as a hash.

• Refactor File->list() and fileList() to accept optional parameters.

• Refactor backupLabel() and add unit tests.

• Silence some perl critic warnings.

Documentation Development

• Update wording for release note sections.

• Ignore clock skew in container libc/package builds using make. It is common for containers to have clock skew so the build process takes care of this issue independently.

Test Development

• Complete statement/branch coverage for Ini.pm.

• Improved functions used to test/munge manifest and info files.

• Coverage testing always enabled on Debian-based containers.

• Require description in every call to testResult().

• Make iWaitSeconds an optional parameter for testResult().

• Updated vagrant to new version and image.

• Fixed flapping archive stop tests.

• Added ability to test warning messages.

v1.17 — Page Checksum Bug Fix

Released: 2017-03-13

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where newly initialized (but unused) pages would cause page checksum warnings.

v1.16 — Page Checksum Improvements, CI, and Package Testing

Released: 2017-03-02

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where tables over 1GB would report page checksum warnings after the first segment.

• Fixed an issue where databases created with a non-default tablespace would raise bogus warnings about pg_filenode.map and pg_internal.init not being page aligned.

Core Development

• Improved the code and tests for fileManifest() to prevent a possible race condition when files are removed by the database while the manifest is being built.

Documentation Development

• Container executions now load the user's environment.

Test Features

• Continuous integration using travis-ci.

• Automated builds of Debian packages for all supported distributions.

Test Development

• Added --dev option to aggregate commonly used dev options.

• Added --retry option.

• Added --no-package option to skip package builds.

• C library and packages are built by default, added -smart option to rebuild only when file changes are detected.

• The --libc-only option has been changed to --build-only now that packages builds have been added.

• Improved formatting of testResult() output.

• Improved truncation when outputting errors logs in the ExecuteTest module.

• Fixed flapping archive-stop test with testResult() retries.

• Added final test of archive contents to archive-push test.

• Temporarily disable flapping keep-alive test.

v1.15 — Refactoring and Bug Fixes

Released: 2017-02-13

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed a regression introduced in v1.13 that could cause backups to fail if files were removed (e.g. tables dropped) while the manifest was being built.

Core Development

• Refactor FileCommon::fileManifest() and FileCommon::fileStat to be more modular to allow complete branch/statement level coverage testing.

Test Development

• Complete branch/statement level coverage testing for FileCommon::fileManifest() and FileCommon::fileStat functions and helper functions.

v1.14 — Refactoring and Bug Fixes

Released: 2017-02-13

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where an archive-push error would not be retried and would instead return errors to PostgreSQL indefinitely (unless the .error file was manually deleted).

• Fixed a race condition in parallel archiving where creation of new paths generated an error when multiple processes attempted to do so at the same time.

Core Improvements

• Improved performance of wal archive min/max provided by the info command.

Documentation Features

• Updated async archiving documentation to more accurately describe how the new method works and how it differs from the old method.

Documentation Development

• Documentation can now be built with reusable blocks to reduce duplication.

• Improved support for --require option and section depends now default to the previous section.

• Added ability to pass options to containers within the documentation.

• Add proper tag to slightly emphasize proper nouns.

v1.13 — Parallel Archiving, Stanza Create, Improved Info and Check

Released: 2017-02-05

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed const assignment giving compiler warning in C library.

• Fixed a few directory syncs that were missed for the --repo-sync option.

• Fixed an issue where a missing user/group on restore could cause an "uninitialized value" error in File->owner().

• Fixed an issue where protocol mismatch errors did not output the expected value.

• Fixed a spurious archive-get log message that indicated an exit code of 1 was an abnormal termination.

Core Features

• Improved, multi-process implementation of asynchronous archiving.

• Improved stanza-create command so that it can repair broken repositories in most cases and is robust enough to be made mandatory.

• Improved check command to run on a standby, though only basic checks are done because pg_switch_xlog() cannot be executed on a replica.

• Added archive and backup WAL ranges to the info command.

• Added warning to update pg_tablespace.spclocation when remapping tablespaces in PostgreSQL < 9.2.

• Remove remote lock requirements for the archive-get, restore, info, and check commands since they are read-only operations.

Core Improvements

• Log file banner is not output until the first log entry is written.

• Reduced the likelihood of torn pages causing a false positive in page checksums by filtering on start backup LSN.

• Remove Intel-specific optimization from C library build flags.

• Remove --lock option. This option was introduced before the lock directory could be located outside the repository and is now obsolete.

• Added --log-timestamp option to allow timestamps to be suppressed in logging. This is primarily used to avoid filters in the automated documentation.

• Return proper error code when unable to convert a relative path to an absolute path.

Core Development

• Refactor File and BackupCommon modules to improve test coverage.

• Moved File->manifest() into the FileCommon.pm module.

• Moved the Archive modules to the Archive directory and split the archive-get and archive-push commands into separate modules.

• Split the check command out of the Archive.pm module.

• Allow logging to be suppressed via logDisable() and logEnable().

• Allow for locks to be taken more than once in the same process without error.

• Lock directories can be created when more than one directory level is required.

• Clean up optionValid()/optionTest() logic in Lock.pm.

• Added Exception::exceptionCode() and Exception::exceptionMessage() to simplify error handling logic.

• Represent .gz extension with a constant.

• Allow empty files to be created with FileCommon::fileStringWrite() and use temp files to avoid partial reads.

• Refactor process IO and process master/minion code out from the common protocol code.

• Fixed alignment issues with multiline logging.

Documentation Features

• Added documentation to the User Guide for the process-max option.

Documentation Development

• Update LICENSE.txt for 2017.

Test Development

• Fixed --no-online tests to suppress expected errors.

• Added integration for testing coverage with Devel::Cover.

• Added unit tests for low-level functions in the File and BackupCommon modules.

• C Library builds only run when C library has actually changed.

• Added more flexibility in initializing and cleaning up after modules and tests.

• testResult() suppresses logging and reports exceptions.

• testException() allows messages to be matched with regular expressions.

• Split test modules into separate files to make the code more maintainable. Tests are dynamically loaded by name rather than requiring an if-else block.

• Allow multiple --module, --test, and --run options to be used for test.pl.

• Added expect log expression to replace year subdirectories in backup.history.

• Refactor name/locations of common modules that setup test environments.

v1.12 — Page Checksums, Configuration, and Bug Fixes

Released: 2016-12-12

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where options that were invalid for the specified command could be provided on the command-line without generating an error. The options were ignored and did not cause any change in behavior, but it did lead to some confusion. Invalid options will now generate an error.

• Fixed an issue where internal symlinks were not being created for tablespaces in the repository. This issue was only apparent when trying to bring up clusters in-place manually using filesystem snapshots and did not affect normal backup and restore.

• Fixed an issue that prevented errors from being output to the console before the logging system was initialized, i.e. while parsing options. Error codes were still being returned accurately so this would not have made a process look like it succeeded when it did not.

• Fixed an issue where the db-port option specified on the backup server would not be properly passed to the remote unless it was from the first configured database.

Core Features

• Added the --checksum-page option to allow pgBackRest to validate page checksums in data files when checksums are enabled on PostgreSQL >= 9.3. Note that this functionality requires a C library which may not initially be available in OS packages. The option will automatically be enabled when the library is present and checksums are enabled on the cluster.

• Added the --repo-link option to allow internal symlinks to be suppressed when the repository is located on a filesystem that does not support symlinks. This does not affect any pgBackRest functionality, but the convenience link latest will not be created and neither will internal tablespace symlinks, which will affect the ability to bring up clusters in-place manually using filesystem snapshots.

• Added the --repo-sync option to allow directory syncs in the repository to be disabled for file systems that do not support them, e.g. NTFS.

• Added a predictable log entry to signal that a command has completed successfully. For example a backup ends successfully with: INFO: backup command end: completed successfully.

Core Improvements

• For simplicity, the pg_control file is now copied with the rest of the files instead of by itself of at the end of the process. The backup command does not require this behavior and the restore copies to a temporary file which is renamed at the end of the restore.

Core Development

• Abstracted code to determine which database cluster is the primary and which are standbys.

• Improved consistency and flexibility of the protocol layer by using JSON for all messages.

• File copy protocol now accepts a function that can do additional processing on the copy buffers and return a result to the calling process.

• Improved IO->bufferRead to always return requested number of bytes until EOF.

• Simplified the result hash of File->manifest(), Db->tablespaceMapGet(), and Db->databaseMapGet().

• Improved errors returned from child processes by removing redundant error level and code.

• Code cleanup in preparation for improved stanza-create command.

• Improved parameter/result logging in debug/trace functions.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that suppressed exceptions in PDF builds.

• Fixed regression in section links introduced in v1.10.

Documentation Features

• Added Retention to QuickStart section.

Documentation Development

• Allow a source to be included as a section so large documents can be broken up.

• Added section link support to Markdown output.

• Added list support to PDF output.

• Added include option to explicitly build sources (complements the exclude option though both cannot be used in the same invocation).

• Added keyword-add option to add keywords without overriding the default keyword.

• Added debug option to doc.pl to easily add the debug keyword to documentation builds.

• Added pre option to doc.pl to easily add the pre keyword to documentation builds.

• Builds in release.pl now remove all docker containers to get consistent IP address assignments.

• Improvements to markdown rendering.

• Remove code dependency on project variable, instead use title param.

Test Development

• Removed erroneous --no-config option in help test module.

• Update control and WAL test files to 9.4 with matching system identifiers.

• Improved exception handling in file unit tests.

• Changed the --no-fork test option to --fork with negation to match all other boolean parameters.

• Various improvements to validation of backup and restore.

• Add more realistic data files to synthetic backup and restore tests.

v1.11 — Bug Fix for Asynchronous Archiving Efficiency

Released: 2016-11-17

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where asynchronous archiving was transferring one file per execution instead of transferring files in batches. This regression was introduced in v1.09 and affected efficiency only, all WAL segments were correctly archived in asynchronous mode.

v1.10 — Stanza Creation and Minor Bug Fixes

Released: 2016-11-08

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where a backup could error if no changes were made to a database between backups and only pg_control changed.

• Fixed an issue where tablespace paths with the same prefix would cause an invalid link error.

Core Features

• Added the stanza-create command to formalize creation of stanzas in the repository.

Core Improvements

• Removed extraneous use lib directives from Perl modules.

Documentation Development

• Fixed missing variable replacements.

• Removed hard-coded host names from configuration file paths.

• Allow command-line length to be configured using cmd-line-len param.

• Added compact param to allow CSS to be embedded in HTML file.

• Added pretty param to produce HTML with proper indenting.

• Only generate HTML menu when required and don't require index page.

• Assign numbers to sections by default.

• VM mount points are now optional.

v1.09 — 9.6 Support, Configurability, and Bug Fixes

Released: 2016-10-10

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed the check command to prevent an error message from being logged if the backup directory does not exist.

• Fixed error message to properly display the archive command when an invalid archive command is detected.

• Fixed an issue where the async archiver would not be started if archive-push did not have enough space to queue a new WAL segment. This meant that the queue would never be cleared without manual intervention (such as calling archive-push directly). PostgreSQL now receives errors when there is not enough space to store new WAL segments but the async process will still be started so that space is eventually freed.

• Fixed a remote timeout that occurred when a local process generated checksums (during resume or restore) but did not copy files, allowing the remote to go idle.

Core Features

• Non-exclusive backups will automatically be used on PostgreSQL 9.6.

• Added the cmd-ssh option to allow the ssh client to be specified.

• Added the log-level-stderr option to control whether console log messages are sent to stderr or stdout. By default this is set to warn which represents a change in behavior from previous versions, even though it may be more intuitive. Setting log-level-stderr=off will preserve the old behavior.

• Set application_name to "pgBackRest [command]" for database connections.

• Check that archive_mode is enabled when archive-check option enabled.

Core Improvements

• Clarified error message when unable to acquire pgBackRest advisory lock to make it clear that it is not a PostgreSQL backup lock.

• pgBackRest version number included in command start INFO log output.

• Process ID logged for local process start/stop INFO log output.

Documentation Features

• Added archive-timeout option documentation to the user guide.

Documentation Development

• Added dev option to doc.pl to easily add the dev keyword to documentation builds.

Test Development

• Update CentOS/Debian package definitions.

• Fixed missing expect output for help module.

• Fixed broken vm-max option in test.pl.

• Regression tests can now be run as any properly-configured user, not just vagrant.

• Minimize TeXLive package list to save time during VM builds.

v1.08 — Bug Fixes and Log Improvements

Released: 2016-09-14

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where local processes were not disconnecting when complete and could later timeout.

• Fixed an issue where the protocol layer could timeout while waiting for WAL segments to arrive in the archive.

Core Improvements

• Cache file log output until the file is created to create a more complete log.

Documentation Development

• Show Process ID in output instead of filtering it out with the timestamp.

Test Development

• Suppress "dpkg-reconfigure: unable to re-open stdin: No file or directory" warning in Vagrant VM build.

• Show Process ID in expect logs instead of filtering it out with the timestamp.

v1.07 — Thread to Process Conversion and Bug Fixes

Released: 2016-09-07

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where tablespaces were copied from the primary during standby backup.

• Fixed the check command so backup info is checked remotely and not just locally.

• Fixed an issue where retention-archive was not automatically being set when retention-archive-type=diff, resulting in a less aggressive than intended expiration of archive.

Core Features

• Converted Perl threads to processes to improve compatibility and performance.

• Exclude contents of $PGDATA/pg_replslot directory so that replication slots on the primary do not become part of the backup.

• The archive-start and archive-stop settings are now filled in backup.manifest even when archive-check=n.

• Additional warnings when archive retention settings may not have the intended effect or would allow indefinite retention.

• Experimental support for non-exclusive backups in PostgreSQL 9.6 rc1. Changes to the control/catalog/WAL versions in subsequent release candidates may break compatibility but pgBackRest will be updated with each release to keep pace.

Core Development

• Refactor of protocol minions in preparation for the new local minion.

• Remove obsolete thread index variable from File() module.

• Changed temporary file names to consistently use the .pgbackrest.tmp extension even if the destination file is compressed or has an appended checksum.

• Improve ASSERT error handling, safely check eval blocks, and convert $@ to $EVAL_ERROR.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fixed minor documentation reproducibility issues related to binary paths.

Documentation Features

• Documentation for archive retention.

Documentation Development

• Suppress TOC for unsupported versions of pgBackRest.

Test Development

• New vagrant base box and make uid/gid selection for containers dynamic.

v1.06 — Backup from Standby and Bug Fixes

Released: 2016-08-25

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where a tablespace link that referenced another link would not produce an error, but instead skip the tablespace entirely.

• Fixed an issue where options that should not allow multiple values could be specified multiple times in pgbackrest.conf without an error being raised.

• Fixed an issue where the protocol-timeout option was not automatically increased when the db-timeout option was increased.

Core Features

• Backup from a standby cluster. A connection to the primary cluster is still required to start/stop the backup and copy files that are not replicated, but the vast majority of files are copied from the standby in order to reduce load on the primary.

• More flexible configuration for databases. Master and standby can both be configured on the backup server and pgBackRest will automatically determine which is the primary. This means no configuration changes for backup are required after failing over from a primary to standby when a separate backup server is used.

• Exclude directories during backup that are cleaned, recreated, or zeroed by PostgreSQL at startup. These include pgsql_tmp and pg_stat_tmp. The postgresql.auto.conf.tmp file is now excluded in addition to files that were already excluded: backup_label.old, postmaster.opts, postmaster.pid, recovery.conf, recovery.done.

• Experimental support for non-exclusive backups in PostgreSQL 9.6 beta4. Changes to the control/catalog/WAL versions in subsequent betas may break compatibility but pgBackRest will be updated with each release to keep pace.

Core Improvements

• Improve error message for links that reference links in manifest build.

• Added hints to error message when relative paths are detected in archive-push or archive-get.

• Improve backup log messages to indicate which host the files are being copied from.

Core Development

• Simplify protocol creation and identifying which host is local/remote.

• Removed all OP_* function constants that were used only for debugging, not in the protocol, and replaced with __PACKAGE__.

• Improvements in Db module: separated out connect() function, allow executeSql() calls that do not return data, and improve error handling.

Documentation Development

• Improve host tag rendering.

Test Development

• Refactor db version constants into a separate module.

• Update synthetic backup tests to PostgreSQL 9.4.

v1.05 — Bug Fix for Tablespace Link Checking

Released: 2016-08-09

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where tablespace paths that had $PGDATA as a substring would be identified as a subdirectories of $PGDATA even when they were not. Also hardened relative path checking a bit.

Documentation Features

• Added documentation for scheduling backups with cron.

Documentation Improvements

• Moved the backlog from the pgBackRest website to the GitHub repository wiki.

Documentation Development

• Improved rendering of spaces in code blocks.

v1.04 — Various Bug Fixes

Released: 2016-07-30

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue an where an extraneous remote was created causing threaded backup/restore to possibly timeout and/or throw a lock conflict.

• Fixed an issue where db-path was not required for the check command so an assert was raised when it was missing rather than a polite error message.

• Fixed check command to throw an error when database version/id does not match that of the archive.

• Fixed an issue where a remote could try to start its own remote when the backup-host option was not present in pgbackrest.conf on the database server.

• Fixed an issue where the contents of pg_xlog were being backed up if the directory was symlinked. This didn't cause any issues during restore but was a waste of space.

• Fixed an invalid log() call in lock routines.

Core Features

• Experimental support for non-exclusive backups in PostgreSQL 9.6 beta3. Changes to the control/catalog/WAL versions in subsequent betas may break compatibility but pgBackRest will be updated with each release to keep pace.

Core Improvements

• Suppress banners on SSH protocol connections.

• Improved remote error messages to identify the host where the error was raised.

• All remote types now take locks. The exceptions date to when the test harness and pgBackRest were running in the same VM and no longer apply.

Core Development

• Enhancements to the protocol layer for improved reliability and error handling.

• Exceptions are now passed back from threads as messages when possible rather than raised directly.

• Temp files created during backup are now placed in the same directory as the target file.

• Output lock file name when a lock cannot be acquired to aid in debugging.

• Reduce calls to protocolGet() in backup/restore.

Documentation Features

• Added clarification on why the default for the backrest-user option is backrest.

• Updated information about package availability on supported platforms.

Documentation Development

• Added release.pl to make releases reproducible. For now this only includes building and deploying documentation.

• HTML footer dates are statically created in English in order to be reproducible.

Test Development

• Fixed a version checking issue in test.pl.

• Fixed an issue where multi-threaded tests were not being run when requested.

• Reduce the frequency that certain tests are run to save time in regression.

• Disable control master for older OS versions where it is less stable.

v1.03 — Check Command and Bug Fixes

Released: 2016-07-02

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where keep-alives could be starved out by lots of small files during multi-threaded backup. They were also completely absent from single/multi-threaded backup resume and restore checksumming.

• Fixed an issue where the expire command would refuse to run when explicitly called from the command line if the db-host option was set. This was not an issue when expire was run automatically after a backup

• Fixed an issue where validation was being running on archive_command even when the archive-check option was disabled.

Core Features

• Added check command to validate that pgBackRest is configured correctly for archiving and backups.

• Added the protocol-timeout option. Previously protocol-timeout was set as db-timeout + 30 seconds.

• Failure to shutdown remotes at the end of the backup no longer throws an exception. Instead a warning is generated that recommends a higher protocol-timeout.

• Experimental support for non-exclusive backups in PostgreSQL 9.6 beta2. Changes to the control/catalog/WAL versions in subsequent betas may break compatibility but pgBackRest will be updated with each release to keep pace.

Core Improvements

• Improved handling of users/groups captured during backup that do not exist on the restore host. Also explicitly handle the case where user/group is not mapped to a name.

• Option handling is now far more strict. Previously it was possible for a command to use an option that was not explicitly assigned to it. This was especially true for the backup-host and db-host options which are used to determine locality.

Core Development

• The pg_xlogfile_name() function is no longer used to construct WAL filenames from LSNs. While this function is convenient it is not available on a standby. Instead, the archive is searched for the LSN in order to find the timeline. If due to some misadventure the LSN appears on multiple timelines then an error will be thrown, whereas before this condition would have passed unnoticed.

• Changed version variable to a constant. It had originally been designed to play nice with a specific packaging tool but that tool was never used.

Documentation Improvements

• Allow a static date to be used for documentation to generate reproducible builds.

• Added documentation for asynchronous archiving to the user guide.

• Recommended install location for pgBackRest modules is now /usr/share/perl5 since /usr/lib/perl5 has been removed from the search path in newer versions of Perl.

• Added instructions for removing prior versions of pgBackRest.

Documentation Development

• Fixed DTD search path that did not work properly when --doc-path was used.

• Fixed pgBackRest-specific xml that was loaded for non-pgBackRest projects.

• Fixed section names being repeated in the info output when multiple --require options depended on the same sections.

• Fixed pgBackRest config sections being blank in the output when not loaded from cache.

• Allow hidden options to be added to a command. This allows certain commands (like apt-get) to be forced during the build without making that a part of the documentation.

• Allow command summaries to be inserted anywhere in the documentation to avoid duplication.

• Update TeX Live to 2016 version.

• New, consolidated implementation for link rendering.

• PostgreSQL version is now a variable to allow multi-version documentation.

Test Development

• Obsolete containers are removed by the --vm-force option.

• Major refactor of the test suite to make it more modular and object-oriented. Multiple Docker containers can now be created for a single test to simulate more realistic environments. Tests paths have been renamed for clarity.

• Greatly reduced the quantity of Docker containers built by default. Containers are only built for PostgreSQL versions specified in db-minimal and those required to build documentation. Additional containers can be built with --db-version=all or by specifying a version, e.g. --db-version=9.4.

v1.02 — Bug Fix for Perl 5.22

Released: 2016-06-02

Core Bug Fixes

• Fix usage of sprintf() due to new constraints in Perl 5.22. Parameters not referenced in the format string are no longer allowed.

Core Development

• Log directory create and file open now using FileCommon functions which produce more detailed error messages on failure.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Fixed syntax that was not compatible with Perl 5.2X.

• Fixed absolute paths that were used for the PDF logo.

Documentation Features

• Release notes are now broken into sections so that bugs, features, and refactors are clearly delineated. An "Additional Notes" section has been added for changes to documentation and the test suite that do not affect the core code.

• Added man page generation.

• The change log was the last piece of documentation to be rendered in Markdown only. Wrote a converter so the document can be output by the standard renderers. The change log will now be located on the website and has been renamed to "Releases".

Documentation Development

• Added an execution cache so that documentation can be generated without setting up the full container environment. This is useful for packaging, keeps the documentation consistent for a release, and speeds up generation when no changes are made in the execution list.

• Remove function constants and pass strings directly to logDebugParam(). The function names were only used once so creating constants for them was wasteful.

• Lists can now be used outside of p and text tags for more flexible document structuring.

Test Development

• Replaced overzealous perl -cW check which failed on Perl 5.22 with perl -cw.

• Added Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) and Debian 8 (Jessie) to the regression suite.

• Upgraded doc/test VM to Ubuntu 16.04. This will help catch Perl errors in the doc code since it is not run across multiple distributions like the core and test code. It is also to be hoped that a newer kernel will make Docker more stable.

• Test release version against the executable using change-log.xml instead of CHANGELOG.md.

v1.01 — Enhanced Info, Selective Restore, and 9.6 Support

Released: 2016-05-17

Core Features

• Enhanced text output of info command to include timestamps, sizes, and the reference list for all backups.

• Allow selective restore of databases from a cluster backup. This feature can result in major space and time savings when only specific databases are restored. Unrestored databases will not be accessible but must be manually dropped before they will be removed from the shared catalogue.

• Experimental support for non-exclusive backups in PostgreSQL 9.6 beta1. Changes to the control/catalog/WAL versions in subsequent betas may break compatibility but pgBackRest will be updated with each release to keep pace.

v1.00 — New Repository Format and Configuration Scheme, Link Support

Released: 2016-04-14

Core Features

• Implemented a new configuration scheme which should be far simpler to use. See the User Guide and Configuration Reference for details but for a simple configuration all options can now be placed in the stanza section. Options that are shared between stanzas can be placed in the [global] section. More complex configurations can still make use of command sections though this should be a rare use case.

• The repo-path option now always refers to the repository where backups and archive are stored, whether local or remote, so the repo-remote-path option has been removed. The new spool-path option can be used to define a location for queueing WAL segments when archiving asynchronously. A local repository is no longer required.

• The default configuration filename is now pgbackrest.conf instead of pg_backrest.conf. This was done for consistency with other naming changes but also to prevent old config files from being loaded accidentally when migrating to 1.00.

• The default repository name was changed from /var/lib/backup to /var/lib/pgbackrest.

• Lock files are now stored in /tmp/pgbackrest by default. These days /run/pgbackrest is the preferred location but that would require init scripts which are not part of this release. The lock-path option can be used to configure the lock directory.

• Log files are now stored in /var/log/pgbackrest by default and no longer have the date appended so they can be managed with logrotate. The log-path option can be used to configure the log directory.

• Executable filename changed from pg_backrest to pgbackrest.

• All files and directories linked from PGDATA are now included in the backup. By default links will be restored directly into PGDATA as files or directories. The --link-all option can be used to restore all links to their original locations. The --link-map option can be used to remap a link to a new location.

• Removed --tablespace option and replaced with --tablespace-map-all option which should more clearly indicate its function.

• Added detail log level which will output more information than info without being as verbose as debug.

v0.92 — Command-line Repository Path Fix

Released: 2016-04-06

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the master process was passing --repo-remote-path instead of --repo-path to the remote and causing the lock files to be created in the default repository directory (/var/lib/backup), generally ending in failure. This was only an issue when --repo-remote-path was defined on the command line rather than in pg_backrest.conf.

v0.91 — Tablespace Bug Fix and Minor Enhancements

Released: 2016-03-22

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed repository incompatibility introduced in pgBackRest 0.90.

Core Features

• Copy global/pg_control last during backups.

• Write .info and .manifest files to temp before moving them to their final locations and fsync'ing.

• Rename --no-start-stop option to --no-online.

Test Features

• Static source analysis using Perl-Critic, currently passes on gentle.

v0.90 — 9.5 Support, Various Enhancements, and Minor Bug Fixes

Released: 2016-02-07

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where specifying --no-archive-check would throw a configuration error.

• Fixed an issue where a temp WAL file left over after a well-timed system crash could cause the next archive-push to fail.

• The retention-archive option can now be be safely set to less than backup retention (retention-full or retention-diff) without also specifying archive-copy=n. The WAL required to make the backups that fall outside of archive retention consistent will be preserved in the archive. However, in this case PITR will not be possible for the backups that fall outside of archive retention.

Core Features

• When backing up and restoring tablespaces pgBackRest only operates on the subdirectory created for the version of PostgreSQL being run against. Since multiple versions can live in a tablespace (especially during a binary upgrade) this prevents too many files from being copied during a backup and other versions possibly being wiped out during a restore. This only applies to PostgreSQL >= 9.0 — prior versions of PostgreSQL could not share a tablespace directory.

• Generate an error when archive-check=y but archive_command does not execute pg_backrest.

• Improved error message when repo-path or repo-remote-path does not exist.

• Added checks for --delta and --force restore options to ensure that the destination is a valid $PGDATA directory. pgBackRest will check for the presence of PG_VERSION or backup.manifest (left over from an aborted restore). If neither file is found then --delta and --force will be disabled but the restore will proceed unless there are files in the $PGDATA directory (or any tablespace directories) in which case the operation will be aborted.

• When restore --set=latest (the default) the actual backup restored will be output to the log.

• Support for PostgreSQL 9.5 partial WAL segments and recovery_target_action setting. The archive_mode = 'always' setting is not yet supported.

• Support for recovery_target = 'immediate' recovery setting introduced in PostgreSQL 9.4.

• The following tablespace checks have been added: paths or files in pg_tblspc, relative links in pg_tblspc, tablespaces in $PGDATA. All three will generate errors.

Documentation Development

• Fixed an issue where document generation failed because some OSs are not tolerant of having multiple installed versions of PostgreSQL. A separate VM is now created for each version. Also added a sleep after database starts during document generation to ensure the database is running before the next command runs.

v0.89 — Timeout Bug Fix and Restore Read-Only Repositories

Released: 2015-12-24

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where longer-running backups/restores would timeout when remote and threaded. Keepalives are now used to make sure the remote for the main process does not timeout while the thread remotes do all the work. The error message for timeouts was also improved to make debugging easier.

Core Features

• Allow restores to be performed on a read-only repository by using --no-lock and --log-level-file=off. The --no-lock option can only be used with restores.

Documentation Development

• Minor styling changes, clarifications and rewording in the user guide.

Test Development

• The dev branch has been renamed to master and for the time being the master branch has renamed to release, though it will probably be removed at some point -- thus ends the gitflow experiment for pgBackRest. It is recommended that any forks get re-forked and clones get re-cloned.

v0.88 — Documentation and Minor Bug Fixes

Released: 2015-11-22

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the start/stop commands required the --config option.

• Fixed an issue where log files were being overwritten instead of appended.

• Fixed an issue where backup-user was not optional.

Core Features

• Symlinks are no longer created in backup directories in the repository. These symlinks could point virtually anywhere and potentially be dangerous. Symlinks are still recreated during a restore.

• Added better messaging for backup expiration. Full and differential backup expirations are logged on a single line along with a list of all dependent backups expired.

• Archive retention is automatically set to full backup retention if not explicitly configured.

Documentation Features

• Added documentation in the user guide for delta restores, expiration, dedicated backup hosts, starting and stopping pgBackRest, and replication.

v0.87 — Website and User Guide

Released: 2015-10-28

Core Features

• The backup_label.old and recovery.done files are now excluded from backups.

Documentation Features

• Added a new user guide that covers pgBackRest basics and some advanced topics including PITR. Much more to come, but it's a start.

Documentation Development

• The website, markdown, and command-line help are now all generated from the same XML source.

v0.85 — Start/Stop Commands and Minor Bug Fixes

Released: 2015-10-08

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where an error could be returned after a backup or restore completely successfully.

• Fixed an issue where a resume would fail if temp files were left in the root backup directory when the backup failed. This scenario was likely if the backup process got terminated during the copy phase.

Core Features

• Added stop and start commands to prevent pgBackRest processes from running on a system where PostgreSQL is shutdown or the system needs to be quiesced for some other reason.

• Experimental support for PostgreSQL 9.5 beta1. This may break when the control version or WAL magic changes in future versions but will be updated in each pgBackRest release to keep pace. All regression tests pass except for --target-resume tests (this functionality has changed in 9.5) and there is no testing yet for .partial WAL segments.

Core Development

• Removed dependency on IO::String module.

v0.82 — Refactoring, Command-line Help, and Minor Bug Fixes

Released: 2015-09-14

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where resumed compressed backups were not preserving existing files.

• Fixed an issue where resume and incr/diff would not ensure that the prior backup had the same compression and hardlink settings.

• Fixed an issue where a cold backup using --no-start-stop could be started on a running PostgreSQL cluster without --force specified.

• Fixed an issue where a thread could be started even when none were requested.

• Fixed an issue where the pgBackRest version number was not being updated in backup.info and archive.info after an upgrade/downgrade.

• Fixed an issue where the info command was throwing an exception when the repository contained no stanzas.

• Fixed an issue where the PostgreSQL pg_stop_backup() NOTICEs were being output to stderr.

Core Features

• Experimental support for PostgreSQL 9.5 alpha2. This may break when the control version or WAL magic changes in future versions but will be updated in each pgBackRest release to keep pace. All regression tests pass except for --target-resume tests (this functionality has changed in 9.5) and there is no testing yet for .partial WAL segments.

Core Improvements

• Renamed recovery-setting option and section to recovery-option to be more consistent with pgBackRest naming conventions.

• Added dynamic module loading to speed up commands, especially asynchronous archiving.

Core Development

• Code cleanup and refactoring to standardize on patterns that have evolved over time.

Documentation Features

• Command-line help is now extracted from the same XML source that is used for the other documentation and includes much more detail.

Test Development

• Expiration tests are now synthetic rather than based on actual backups. This will allow development of more advanced expiration features.

v0.80 — DBI Support, Stability, and Convenience Features

Released: 2015-08-09

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that caused the formatted timestamp for both the oldest and newest backups to be reported as the current time by the info command. Only text output was affected -- json output reported the correct epoch values.

• Fixed protocol issue that was preventing ssh errors (especially on connection) from being logged.

Core Features

• The repository is now created and updated with consistent directory and file modes. By default umask is set to 0000 but this can be disabled with the neutral-umask setting.

• Added the stop-auto option to allow failed backups to automatically be stopped when a new backup starts.

• Added the db-timeout option to limit the amount of time pgBackRest will wait for pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup() to return.

• Remove pg_control file at the beginning of the restore and copy it back at the very end. This prevents the possibility that a partial restore can be started by PostgreSQL.

• Added checks to be sure the db-path setting is consistent with db-port by comparing the data_directory as reported by the cluster against the db-path setting and the version as reported by the cluster against the value read from pg_control. The db-socket-path setting is checked to be sure it is an absolute path.

• Experimental support for PostgreSQL 9.5 alpha1. This may break when the control version or WAL magic changes in future versions but will be updated in each pgBackRest release to keep pace. All regression tests pass except for --target-resume tests (this functionality has changed in 9.5) and there is no testing yet for .partial WAL segments.

Core Improvements

• Now using Perl DBI and DBD::Pg for connections to PostgreSQL rather than psql. The cmd-psql and cmd-psql-option settings have been removed and replaced with db-port and db-socket-path. Follow the instructions in the Installation Guide to install DBD::Pg on your operating system.

Core Development

• Major refactoring of the protocol layer to support future development.

Documentation Development

• Split most of README.md out into USERGUIDE.md and CHANGELOG.md because it was becoming unwieldy. Changed most references to "database" in the user guide to "database cluster" for clarity.

• Changed most references to "database" in the user guide to "database cluster" for clarity.

Test Features

• Added vagrant test configurations for Ubuntu 14.04 and CentOS 7.

v0.78 — Remove CPAN Dependencies, Stability Improvements

Released: 2015-07-13

Core Improvements

• Removed dependency on CPAN packages for multi-threaded operation. While it might not be a bad idea to update the threads and Thread::Queue packages, it is no longer necessary.

• Modified wait backoff to use a Fibonacci rather than geometric sequence. This will make wait time grow less aggressively while still giving reasonable values.

Test Features

• Added vagrant test configurations for Ubuntu 12.04 and CentOS 6.

Test Development

• More options for regression tests and improved code to run in a variety of environments.

v0.77 — CentOS/RHEL 6 Support and Protocol Improvements

Released: 2015-06-30

Core Features

• Added file and directory syncs to the File object for additional safety during backup/restore and archiving.

• Added support for Perl 5.10.1 and OpenSSH 5.3 which are default for CentOS/RHEL 6.

• Improved error message when backup is run without archive_command set and without --no-archive-check specified.

Core Development

• Removed pg_backrest_remote and added the functionality to pg_backrest as the remote command.

• Moved version number out of the VERSION file to Version.pm to better support packaging.

• Replaced IPC::System::Simple and Net::OpenSSH with IPC::Open3 to eliminate CPAN dependency for multiple operating systems.

v0.75 — New Repository Format, Info Command and Experimental 9.5 Support

Released: 2015-06-14

Core Features

• Added the info command.

• Logging now uses unbuffered output. This should make log files that are being written by multiple threads less chaotic.

• Experimental support for PostgreSQL 9.5. This may break when the control version or WAL magic changes but will be updated in each release.

Core Improvements

• More efficient file ordering for backup. Files are copied in descending size order so a single thread does not end up copying a large file at the end. This had already been implemented for restore.

v0.70 — Stability Improvements for Archiving, Improved Logging and Help

Released: 2015-06-01

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where archive-copy would fail on an incr/diff backup when hardlink=n. In this case the pg_xlog path does not already exist and must be created.

• Fixed an issue in async archiving where archive-push was not properly returning 0 when archive-max-mb was reached and moved the async check after transfer to avoid having to remove the stop file twice. Also added unit tests for this case and improved error messages to make it clearer to the user what went wrong.

• Fixed a locking issue that could allow multiple operations of the same type against a single stanza. This appeared to be benign in terms of data integrity but caused spurious errors while archiving and could lead to errors in backup/restore.

Core Features

• Allow duplicate WAL segments to be archived when the checksum matches. This is necessary for some recovery scenarios.

• Allow comments/disabling in pg_backrest.conf using the # character. Only # characters in the first character of the line are honored.

• Better logging before pg_start_backup() to make it clear when the backup is waiting on a checkpoint.

• Various command behavior and logging fixes.

Core Improvements

• Replaced JSON module with JSON::PP which ships with core Perl.

Documentation Bug Fixes

• Various help fixes.

v0.65 — Improved Resume and Restore Logging, Compact Restores

Released: 2015-05-11

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where an absolute path was not written into recovery.conf when the restore was run with a relative path.

Core Features

• Better resume support. Resumed files are checked to be sure they have not been modified and the manifest is saved more often to preserve checksums as the backup progresses. More unit tests to verify each resume case.

• Resume is now optional. Use the resume setting or --no-resume from the command line to disable.

• More info messages during restore. Previously, most of the restore messages were debug level so not a lot was output in the log.

• Added tablespace setting to allow tablespaces to be restored into the pg_tblspc path. This produces compact restores that are convenient for development, staging, etc. Currently these restores cannot be backed up as pgBackRest expects only links in the pg_tblspc path.

v0.61 — Bug Fix for Uncompressed Remote Destination

Released: 2015-04-21

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed a buffering error that could occur on large, highly-compressible files when copying to an uncompressed remote destination. The error was detected in the decompression code and resulted in a failed backup rather than corruption so it should not affect successful backups made with previous versions.

v0.60 — Better Version Support and WAL Improvements

Released: 2015-04-19

Core Bug Fixes

• Pushing duplicate WAL now generates an error. This worked before only if checksums were disabled.

Core Features

• Database System IDs are used to make sure that all WAL in an archive matches up. This should help prevent misconfigurations that send WAL from multiple clusters to the same archive.

Core Development

• Improved threading model by starting threads early and terminating them late.

Test Features

• Regression tests working back to PostgreSQL 8.3.

v0.50 — Restore and Much More

Released: 2015-03-25

Core Bug Fixes

• Fixed broken checksums and now they work with normal and resumed backups. Finally realized that checksums and checksum deltas should be functionally separated and this simplified a number of things. Issue #28 has been created for checksum deltas.

• Fixed an issue where a backup could be resumed from an aborted backup that didn't have the same type and prior backup.

Core Features

• Added restore functionality.

• All options can now be set on the command-line making pg_backrest.conf optional.

• De/compression is now performed without threads and checksum/size is calculated in stream. That means file checksums are no longer optional.

• Added option --no-start-stop to allow backups when Postgres is shut down. If postmaster.pid is present then --force is required to make the backup run (though if Postgres is running an inconsistent backup will likely be created). This option was added primarily for the purpose of unit testing, but there may be applications in the real world as well.

• Checksum for backup.manifest to detect a corrupted/modified manifest.

• Link latest always points to the last backup. This has been added for convenience and to make restores simpler.

Core Development

• Removed dependency on Moose. It wasn't being used extensively and makes for longer startup times.

Test Features

• More comprehensive unit tests in all areas.

v0.30 — Core Restructuring and Unit Tests

Released: 2014-10-05

Core Development

• Complete rewrite of BackRest::File module to use a custom protocol for remote operations and Perl native GZIP and SHA operations. Compression is performed in threads rather than forked processes.

• Removed dependency on Storable and replaced with a custom ini file implementation.

• Numerous other changes that can only be identified with a diff.

Documentation Features

• Added much needed documentation

Test Features

• Fairly comprehensive unit tests for all the basic operations. More work to be done here for sure, but then there is always more work to be done on unit tests.

v0.19 — Improved Error Reporting/Handling

Released: 2014-05-13

Core Bug Fixes

• Found and squashed a nasty bug where file_copy() was defaulted to ignore errors. There was also an issue in file_exists() that was causing the test to fail when the file actually did exist. Together they could have resulted in a corrupt backup with no errors, though it is very unlikely.

Core Development

• Worked on improving error handling in the File object. This is not complete, but works well enough to find a few errors that have been causing us problems (notably, find is occasionally failing building the archive async manifest when system is under load).

v0.18 — Return Soft Error When Archive Missing

Released: 2014-04-13

Core Bug Fixes

• The archive-get command now returns a 1 when the archive file is missing to differentiate from hard errors (ssh connection failure, file copy error, etc.) This lets PostgreSQL know that the archive stream has terminated normally. However, this does not take into account possible holes in the archive stream.

v0.17 — Warn When Archive Directories Cannot Be Deleted

Released: 2014-04-03

Core Bug Fixes

• If an archive directory which should be empty could not be deleted backrest was throwing an error. There's a good fix for that coming, but for the time being it has been changed to a warning so processing can continue. This was impacting backups as sometimes the final archive file would not get pushed if the first archive file had been in a different directory (plus some bad luck).

v0.16 — RequestTTY=yes for SSH Sessions

Released: 2014-04-01

Core Bug Fixes

• Added RequestTTY=yes to ssh sessions. Hoping this will prevent random lockups.

v0.15 — Added archive-get

Released: 2014-03-29

Core Features

• Added archive-get functionality to aid in restores.

• Added option to force a checkpoint when starting the backup, start-fast=y.

v0.11 — Minor Fixes

Released: 2014-03-26

Core Bug Fixes

• Removed master_stderr_discard option on database SSH connections. There have been occasional lockups and they could be related to issues originally seen in the file code.

• Changed lock file conflicts on backup and expire commands to ERROR. They were set to DEBUG due to a copy-and-paste from the archive locks.

v0.10 — Backup and Archiving are Functional

Released: 2014-03-05

Core Features

• No restore functionality, but the backup directories are consistent PostgreSQL data directories. You'll need to either uncompress the files or turn off compression in the backup. Uncompressed backups on a ZFS (or similar) filesystem are a good option because backups can be restored locally via a snapshot to create logical backups or do spot data recovery.

• Archiving is single-threaded. This has not posed an issue on our multi-terabyte databases with heavy write volume. Recommend a large WAL volume or to use the async option with a large volume nearby.

• Backups are multi-threaded, but the Net::OpenSSH library does not appear to be 100% thread-safe so it will very occasionally lock up on a thread. There is an overall process timeout that resolves this issue by killing the process. Yes, very ugly.

• Checksums are lost on any resumed backup. Only the final backup will record checksum on multiple resumes. Checksums from previous backups are correctly recorded and a full backup will reset everything.

• The backup.manifest is being written as Storable because Config::IniFile does not seem to handle large files well. Would definitely like to save these as human-readable text.

Documentation Features

• Absolutely no documentation (outside the code). Well, excepting these release notes.