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Postgresql 17 added a new feature to make incremental backups. I want to use this to make daily incremental backups, however I am struggling to find a good method for automatization, as the build in pg_basebackup --incremental always needs a path to the last incremental backup. Providing the path is easy for normal operation, however, I don't want to implement error handling for all cases where something could go wrong.

I have also looked into barman, which has support for incremental block level backups, however I don't need to pair it with WAL archiving (which I could not turn off) and it seems like I still need to manually trigger the backup anyway. pgBackRest seems to have no support for these backups at all.

Maybe there is a better alternative than using the build in incremental backup, however it seems to fit my requirements almost perfectly:

  • Large DB (>1TB) and limited backup space
  • Cannot shut the DB down
  • No big problem if one day of data would be lost

Is there any tool that I am missing that could handle my problem?

McToel
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1 Answers1

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You cannot use incremental backups without a WAL archive.

pgBackRest has its own implementation for incremental backups, but that also needs a WAL archive.

You can guess what my recommendation is: get a WAL archive.

Laurenz Albe
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