Postgres backup tooling
The Backups section of awesome-postgres, all fourteen entries, as catalogued on 2026-08-20. pgbackrest is written up from its own documentation; the rest are recorded at the catalog's word (T3), unverified here.
Fourteen entries for one job is itself the observation. Every one of them is an answer to the same two-part obligation write-ahead-logging states — take physical base backups, and never lose a WAL segment in between — and they differ mainly in where the repository lives and how much parallelism they bring to it.
Full-service backup managers
| Entry | Catalogued as |
|---|---|
| pgbackrest | Reliable backup and restore. Paged from primary sources |
| Barman | Backup and Recovery Manager, by 2ndQuadrant |
| pg_probackup | Incremental backups and multithreaded restore |
| pitrery | Bash scripts for PITR backup management |
| pg_back | Simple backup script |
| OmniPITR | Advanced WAL file management tools |
Barman is the one to read next: it is the other mature, widely-deployed manager in this list, from the 2ndQuadrant lineage now inside EDB, and a second independent design would test how much of pgbackrest's feature list is inherent to the problem rather than one project's choices.
Cloud object-store targets
| Entry | Catalogued as |
|---|---|
| wal-g | WAL-E successor in Go, supporting multiple cloud services |
| wal-e | Continuous archiving to S3/Azure/Swift — the catalog marks this "obsolete" |
| pghoard | Backup/restore for cloud object stores |
| postgres-backup-oss | Docker container for Alibaba Cloud OSS |
| pg-backups-to-s3 | Docker solution with compression and encryption |
The wal-e → wal-g succession is the only staleness signal in the entire catalog, noted on
awesome-postgres as that source's defining weakness. Everything else in these fourteen rows is
undated.
Packaged and scheduled
| Entry | Catalogued as |
|---|---|
| Databasus | Scheduled backups via web UI with multiple storage options |
| pgbackweb | Docker-based backup tool with web interface |
| pgbackup-sidecar | Lightweight Docker sidecar automating backups |
A third of the section is containerised convenience wrappers, which says something about where the demand is: the hard parts (parallel archive, delta restore, verification) are solved, and the recurring complaint is scheduling and operating them.
What no entry in this section claims
Not one catalog line mentions restore testing. pgbackrest's page makes the point that verification is what separates a backup tool from a copy; the section as a whole is described entirely in terms of taking backups, not proving they restore.
Related
pgbackrest · write-ahead-logging · patroni · postgres-ha-tooling · awesome-postgres · operational-databases