Release Notes

pgBackRest release history with detailed changelog for every version.

Introduction

pgBackRest release numbers have major and minor parts. A major release may break compatibility with the previous major release. However, v2 releases fully support v1 repositories and accept all v1 options. Minor releases can add features and bug fixes. They do not change the repository format and aim to preserve option names and behavior. See the v1 documentation.

A release can include “Additional Notes”. These cover only documentation or test-suite changes and do not directly affect the pgBackRest codebase.

Current Stable Release

v2.59.2 Release Notes

PostgreSQL 19beta4 Support

Released September 27, 2026

Bug Fixes:

Fix empty block map when file is truncated to zero during backup. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by JPCOSTA78.)
Disable read retry when filters are passed to the driver. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by megamaced.)
Fix pagination of S3 version listing. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley, guruguruguru. Reported by guruguruguru.)
Set the Azure version header for SAS authentication. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by Florian Helmberger.)
Fix async archive-push stalling on a zero-size backup history file. (Fixed by Andrew Kroh. Reviewed by David Steele, Douglas J Hunley.)
Fix annotate command on a remote encrypted repository. (Fixed by Douglas J Hunley. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Features:

PostgreSQL 19beta4 support.

Stable Releases

v2.59.1 Release Notes

PostgreSQL 19beta3 Support

Released August 17, 2026

Bug Fixes:

Fix hang when the chunk buffer is smaller than the input buffer. (Reviewed by Andrew Pogrebnoi, Douglas J Hunley. Reported by crajac66.)
Compare a new backup label only against its own full backup set. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by Anton Glushakov.)
Fix source archives generated by GitHub missing files required to build. (Reported by aardvarkzed.)

Features:

PostgreSQL 19beta3 support. (Contributed by Lardière Sébastien. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Document exception for dots in S3 bucket names when repo-s3-uri-style=path.
Remove explicit hot_standby configuration from user guide.

v2.59.0 Release Notes

PostgreSQL 19beta2 Support

Released July 20, 2026

NOTE TO PACKAGERS: A new distribution tarball simplifies builds with pregenerated HTML documentation, a man page, and code. Each release includes a pgbackrest-{version}.tar.gz asset. See its README.md for details. Use this tarball to avoid the additional code-generation tools that future releases require. See New Distribution Tarball.

NOTE TO PACKAGERS: libsystemd is a new optional dependency.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Starting with this release, only restore can run as root by default. Use allow-root for other commands, although this is not recommended.

Bug Fixes:

Fix expire removing a backup in progress on another host. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by Dmitrii.)
Fix archive-push-queue-max not enforced when a WAL file errors. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by vut12.)
Fix async archive-get failure during recovery across a timeline switch. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by Jimmy Yih.)
Fix potential buffer overrun in error module. (Fixed by Christophe Pettus. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix use-after-free of parallel protocol client. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by Georgy Shelkovy.)
Fix heap overflow when a pg option is set without pg1. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Reported by Naveen.)

Features:

PostgreSQL 19beta2 support. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Add archive-expire-before option to clean up WAL archive. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add batch delete for Azure storage. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley, Crispy.)
Add support for S3 Outposts. (Contributed by Shiva Kumar Ambigi. Reviewed by David Steele, Roberto Mello.)
Add S3 process authentication. (Reviewed by Andrew Charlton. Suggested by Andrew Charlton.)

Improvements:

Reconnect SFTP storage after the server drops an idle connection. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by mustafa0x, tisserat.)
Add user/group caching for faster manifest build. (Contributed by Gunnar Lindholm. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add per-repo backup progress to info command output. (Contributed by Will Morland. Reviewed by David Steele, Stefan Fercot.)
Add backup.info checks to verify command. (Contributed by Denis Garsh. Reviewed by David Steele, Douglas J Hunley.)
Allow the S3 STS endpoint to be configured. (Contributed by Simon Gratton. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add archive-push-batch-size to limit WAL pushed per asynchronous run. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Exit async archive-push on first error. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Lardière Sébastien.)
Harden HTTP chunked response parsing. (Contributed by Shubham. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Error when running as root unless allow-root is enabled. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley.)
Fewer binary searches when building manifest. (Contributed by Gunnar Lindholm. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Improve seek performance during block incremental delta restore. (Reviewed by David Christensen, Douglas J Hunley.)
Bundle backup files in order rather than scanning for a better fit. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Report the underlying error when a query fails to complete. (Reviewed by Andrew Pogrebnoi. Suggested by Marco Fontana.)
Report the actual error when an S3 credential request fails. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by Mitchell Grice.)
Report archive-push spool path errors to the PostgreSQL log. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by Don Seiler.)
Hint that pgBackRest may be out of date when a version is unsupported.
Add systemd notify integration. (Contributed by Andrew Jackson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Suppress unused parameter errors in meson compiler probes. (Contributed by Jörg Plate. Reviewed by David Steele.)
C11 is now the minimum C standard. (Reviewed by Mohammad Ali Nazir Kosar.)

Documentation Improvements:

Make stanza option internal for the repo-* commands. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Document that info reads encryption settings from global section. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Ron Johnson.)
Document that expire-auto uses the backup command configuration. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Lardière Sébastien.)
Document adjusting the logrotate su directive for a dedicated user. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by lkanbus.)
Document that end-of-line comments are not supported in config files. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by Alex Richman.)

Test Suite Improvements:

Fix Alpine group conflicts in CI containers. (Contributed by Artur Zakirov. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.58.0 Release Notes

Object Storage Improvements

Released January 19, 2026

IMPORTANT NOTE: This release increased the minimum repo-storage-upload-chunk-size values to the minimums permitted by storage vendors.

Bug Fixes:

Fix deadlock due to logging in signal handler. (Fixed by Maxim Michkov. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Features:

HTTP support for S3, GCS, and Azure. (Contributed by Will Morland. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Allow expiration of oldest full backup regardless of current retention. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Ron Johnson.)
Support for Azure managed identities. (Contributed by Moiz Ibrar, Matthew Mols. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Experimental support for S3 EKS pod identity. (Contributed by Pierre BOUTELOUP. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Allow configuration of TLS cipher suites. (Contributed by Gunnar “Nick” Bluth. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Allow process priority to be set. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley.)

Improvements:

Allow dots in S3 bucket names when using path-style URIs. (Contributed by Joakim Hindersson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Require TLS >= 1.2 unless verification is disabled. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley, Gunnar “Nick” Bluth.)
Dynamically size S3/GCS/Azure chunks for large uploads. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by Timothée Peignier.)
Optimize S3/GCS/Azure chunk size for small files. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley.)
Remove support for PostgreSQL 9.5. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley.)
Improve logging of default for options with an unresolved dependency. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)

Documentation Improvements:

Remove explicit max_wal_senders/wal_level configuration from user guide. (Suggested by Jamie Nguyen.)
Clarify that bundling is useful for filesystems with large block sizes. (Suggested by Ron Johnson.)

v2.57.0 Release Notes

Suppress Repository Symlinks

Released October 18, 2025

Bug Fixes:

Unnest HTTP/TLS/socket timeouts. (Reviewed by David Christensen.)
Fix possible segfault in page checksum error message. (Fixed by Zsolt Parragi. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Features:

Add repo-symlink option to suppress creation of repository symlinks. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by Ron Johnson.)

Improvements:

Add HTTP retries for 408 and 429 errors. (Reviewed by David Christensen.)

v2.56.0 Release Notes

Progress Info Improvements

Released July 21, 2025

Bug Fixes:

Fix issue with adhoc expiration when no backups in a repository. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Anup Gupta.)

Features:

Add restore progress to info command output. (Contributed by Denis Garsh, Maxim Michkov. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add progress-only detail level for info command output. (Contributed by Denis Garsh. Reviewed by David Steele, Stefan Fercot.)

Improvements:

Retry failed reads on object stores. (Reviewed by David Christensen.)
Fix defaults in command-line help. (Reviewed by David Christensen, Chris Bandy.)

Documentation Improvements:

Describe discrete option values in a list where appropriate. (Contributed by Anton Kurochkin. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix “less than” in help output for archive-mode option. (Contributed by Anton Kurochkin. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.55.1 Release Notes

Bug Fixes

Released May 5, 2025

Bug Fixes:

Revert “calculate content-md5 on S3 only when required”. (Reviewed by David Christensen. Reported by Frank Brendel.)
Fix lower bounds checking for option keys. (Reviewed by David Christensen, Wolfgang Walther. Reported by Wolfgang Walther.)

v2.55.0 Release Notes

Verification Improvements and PostgreSQL 18 Support

Released April 21, 2025

Bug Fixes:

Fix block incremental restore issue on non-default repository. (Reviewed by David Christensen, Aleksander Łukasz. Reported by Aleksander Łukasz.)
Do not set recovery_target_timeline=current for PostgreSQL < 12. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Fix expire archive range logging. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Aleš Zelený.)
Fix error reporting for queries with no results. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Susantha Bathige.)

Features:

Verify recovery target timeline. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Allow verification of a specified backup. (Contributed by Maxim Michkov. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add support for S3/GCS requester pays. (Contributed by Timothée Peignier. Reviewed by David Steele.)
PostgreSQL 18 support. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Allow connections to PostgreSQL on abstract domain sockets. (Reviewed by Chris Bandy. Suggested by Chris Bandy.)
Add numeric output to version command. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Improvements:

Allow backup command to operate on remote repositories. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Use lz4 for protocol compression. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Calculate content-md5 on S3 only when required. (Reviewed by David Christensen.)
Warn when a value for a multi-key option is overwritten. (Reviewed by David Christensen, Stefan Fercot.)
Add detail logging for expired archive path. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Remove support for PostgreSQL 9.4. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Remove autoconf/make build. (Reviewed by David Christensen.)

Documentation Improvements:

Fix documentation for specifying multiple stanzas with tls-server-auth. (Reviewed by David Christensen, Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Terry MacAndrew.)
Clarify incremental backup expiration. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Clarify requirement for local/remote pgBackRest versions to match. (Contributed by Greg Clough. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add FAQ about exporting self-contained cluster. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Caveat --tablespace-map-all regarding tablespace creation. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, Christophe Courtois. Suggested by Christophe Courtois.)
Clarify behavior of --repo-retention-full-type. (Reviewed by Antoine Beaupré. Suggested by Antoine Beaupré.)
Change --process-max recommendation for object stores to --repo-bundle. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Update unix_socket_directory to unix_socket_directories. (Contributed by hyunkyu han. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Recommend not placing spool-path within pg_xlog/pg_wal. (Reviewed by Martín Marqués, Don Seiler. Suggested by Martín Marqués.)

v2.54.2 Release Notes

Bug Fix

Released January 20, 2025

Bug Fixes:

Fix issue after disabling bundling with block incremental enabled. (Reviewed by David Christensen.)

Documentation Improvements:

Clarify behavior of multiple configuration files. (Reviewed by Paul Bierly. Suggested by Paul Bierly.)

v2.54.1 Release Notes

Bug Fix

Released December 16, 2024

Bug Fixes:

Fix issue with version/help commands attempting to load pgbackrest.conf. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Bradford Boyle, Julian.)

Test Suite Improvements:

Stabilize async archiving in integration tests. (Contributed by Viktor Kurilko. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.54.0 Release Notes

Target Time for Versioned Storage

Released October 21, 2024

NOTE TO PACKAGERS: This was the last feature release with autoconf/make support. Migrate to meson. Any 2.54.X patch releases will still support autoconf/make.

Bug Fixes:

Fix PostgreSQL query performance for large datasets. (Fixed by Thibault Vincent, David Steele. Reviewed by David Christensen, Antoine Millet. Reported by Antoine Millet.)

Features:

Allow repositories on versioned storage to be read at a target time. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, David Christensen.)
Allow requested standby backup to proceed with no standby. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)

Improvements:

Summarize backup reference list for info command text output. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Refresh web-id token for each S3 authentication. (Contributed by Brent Graveland. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Correctly display current values for indexed options in help. (Reviewed by David Christensen.)
Save backup.info only when contents have changed. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Remove limitation on reading files in parallel during restore. (Reviewed by David Christensen.)
Improve SFTP error messages. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Features:

Add performance tuning section to user guide. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)

Documentation Improvements:

Clarify source for data_directory. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Matthias.)
Better logic for deciding when a summary should be lower-cased. (Suggested by Daniel Westermann.)

v2.53.1 Release Notes

PostgreSQL 17 Support

Released August 19, 2024

Bug Fixes:

Fix permissions when restore run as root user. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Will M.)
Fix segfault on delayed connection errors. (Reviewed by David Christensen. Reported by Anton Glushakov.)
Skip local repository duplicate check for SFTP. (Fixed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by Anton Kurochkin.)

Improvements:

PostgreSQL 17 support.

v2.53 Release Notes

Concurrent Backups

Released July 22, 2024

IMPORTANT NOTE: This release changed the log-level-stderr default from warn to off. This simplifies error capture when only stdout is redirected. To keep the previous behavior, set log-level-stderr=warn.

NOTE TO PACKAGERS: The meson build now requires the lz4 library.

NOTE TO PACKAGERS: The meson build now requires compiler support for __builtin_clzl() and __builtin_bswap64().

Bug Fixes:

Fix SFTP renaming failure when file already exists. (Fixed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by ahmed112212.)

Features:

Allow backups to run concurrently on different repositories. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson, Stefan Fercot.)
Support IP-based SANs for TLS certificate validation. (Contributed by David Christensen. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Improvements:

Default log-level-stderr option to off. (Reviewed by Greg Sabino Mullane, Stefan Fercot.)
Allow alternative WAL segment sizes for PostgreSQL ≤ 10. (Contributed by Viktor Kurilko. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add hint to check SFTP authorization log. (Contributed by Vitalii Zurian. Reviewed by Reid Thompson, David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Clarify archive-push multi-repo behavior. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)

v2.52.1 Release Notes

Bug Fix

Released June 25, 2024

Bug Fixes:

Fix issue with files larger on the replica than on the primary. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Nicolas Lassimonne.)

v2.52 Release Notes

PostgreSQL 17beta1 Support

Released May 27, 2024

NOTE TO PACKAGERS: This release made meson the pgBackRest build system. The autoconf/make build would receive no new features and was scheduled for removal after a few releases.

Features:

Add GCS batch delete support. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson.)
S3 SSE-C encryption support. (Reviewed by Tim Jones. Suggested by Tim Jones.)
PostgreSQL 17beta1 support. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)

Improvements:

Allow explicit disabling of optional dependencies in meson builds. (Contributed by Michael Schout. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Dynamically find python in meson build. (Contributed by Michael Schout. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Tag pgbackrest build target in meson as installable. (Contributed by Bradford Boyle. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Update start/stop documentation to reflect actual functionality. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)

v2.51 Release Notes

Meson Build System

Released March 25, 2024

Bug Fixes:

Skip zero-length files for block incremental delta restore. (Reviewed by Sebastian Krause, René Højbjerg Larsen. Reported by Sebastian Krause.)
Fix performance regression in storage list. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Reported by Maksym Boguk.)
Fix progress logging when file size changes during backup. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Reported by samkingno.)

Improvements:

Improved support for dual stack connections. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Suggested by Timothée Peignier.)
Make meson the primary build system. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Detect files that have not changed during non-delta incremental backup. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Prevent invalid recovery when backup_label removed. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Improve archive-push WAL segment queue handling. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Limit resume functionality to full backups. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost, Stefan Fercot.)
Update resume functionality for block incremental. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Allow --version and --help for version and help. (Reviewed by Greg Sabino Mullane. Suggested by Greg Sabino Mullane.)
Add detailed backtrace to autoconf/make build. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)

Documentation Improvements:

Update references to recovery.conf. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Stephen Frost.)

v2.50 Release Notes

Performance Improvements and Bug Fixes

Released January 22, 2024

Bug Fixes:

Fix short read in block incremental restore. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost, Brent Graveland. Reported by Adol Rodriguez, Brent Graveland.)
Fix overflow suppressing backup progress in info output. (Fixed by Robert Donovan. Reviewed by Joe Wildish.)

Improvements:

Preserve partial files during block incremental delta restore. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Add support for alternate compile-time page sizes. (Contributed by Viktor Kurilko. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Skip files truncated during backup when bundling. (Contributed by Georgy Shelkovy. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Improve SFTP storage error messages. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.49 Release Notes

Remove PostgreSQL 9.3 Support

Released November 27, 2023

Bug Fixes:

Fix regression in retries. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Reported by Norman Adkins, Tanel Suurhans, Jordan English, Timothée Peignier.)
Fix recursive path remove in SFTP storage driver. (Fixed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Reported by Luc.)

Improvements:

Remove support for PostgreSQL 9.3. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)

Documentation Features:

Document maintainer options. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Update point-in-time recovery documentation for PostgreSQL >= 13.

Test Suite Improvements:

Allow config/load unit test to run without libssh2 installed. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Wu Ning.)

v2.48 Release Notes

Repository Storage Tags

Released September 25, 2023

Bug Fixes:

Fix issue restoring block incremental without a block list. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost, Burak Yurdakul. Reported by Burak Yurdakul.)

Features:

Add --repo-storage-tag option to create object tags. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost, Stefan Fercot, Timothée Peignier.)
Add known hosts checking for SFTP storage driver. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by Stephen Frost, David Steele.)
Support for dual stack connections. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Add backup size completed/total to info command JSON output. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Improvements:

Multi-stanza check command. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Retry reads of pg_control until checksum is valid. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, Stephen Frost.)
Optimize WAL segment check after successful backup. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Improve GCS multi-part performance. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson.)
Allow archive-get command to run when stanza is stopped. (Reviewed by Tom Swartz, David Christensen, Reid Thompson.)
Accept leading tilde in paths for SFTP public/private keys. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Reload GCS credentials before renewing authentication token. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Suggested by Daniel Farina.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Fix configuration reference example for the tls-server-address option. (Fixed by Hartmut Goebel. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix command reference example for the filter option.

Test Suite Improvements:

Allow storage/sftp unit test to run without libssh2 installed. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Wu Ning.)

v2.47 Release Notes

Performance Improvements and Bug Fixes

Released July 24, 2023

Bug Fixes:

Preserve block incremental info in manifest during delta backup. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Reported by Francisco Miguel Biete Banon.)
Fix block incremental file names in verify command. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson. Reported by Francisco Miguel Biete Banon.)
Fix spurious automatic delta backup on backup from standby. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Reported by krmozejko, Don Seiler.)
Skip recovery.signal for PostgreSQL >= 12 when recovery type=none. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by T.Anastacio.)
Fix unique label generation for diff/incr backup. (Fixed by Andrey Sokolov. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix time-based archive expiration when no backups are expired. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)

Improvements:

Improve performance of SFTP storage driver. (Contributed by Stephen Frost, Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add timezone offset to info command date/time output. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, Philip Hurst. Suggested by Philip Hurst.)
Centralize error handling for unsupported features. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)

Documentation Improvements:

Clarify preference to install from packages in the user guide. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by dr-kd.)

v2.46 Release Notes

Block Incremental Backup and SFTP Storage

Released May 22, 2023

Features:

Block incremental backup. (Reviewed by John Morris, Stephen Frost, Stefan Fercot.)
SFTP support for repository storage. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by Stephen Frost, David Steele.)
PostgreSQL 16 support. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)

Improvements:

Allow page header checks to be skipped. (Reviewed by David Christensen. Suggested by David Christensen.)
Avoid chown() on recovery files during restore. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, Marcelo Henrique Neppel. Suggested by Marcelo Henrique Neppel.)
Add error retry detail for HTTP retries.

Documentation Improvements:

Add warning about using recovery type=none. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Add note about running stanza-create on already-created repositories.

v2.45 Release Notes

Block Incremental Backup (BETA)

Released March 20, 2023

Bug Fixes:

Skip writing recovery.signal by default for restores of offline backups. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Marcel Borger.)

Features:

Block incremental backup (BETA). (Reviewed by John Morris, Stephen Frost, Stefan Fercot.)

Improvements:

Keep only one all-default group index. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)

Documentation Improvements:

Add explicit instructions for upgrading between 2.x versions. (Contributed by Christophe Courtois. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Remove references to SSH made obsolete when TLS was introduced.

v2.44 Release Notes

Remove PostgreSQL 9.0/9.1/9.2 Support

Released January 30, 2023

Improvements:

Remove support for PostgreSQL 9.0/9.1/9.2. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Restore errors when no backup matches the current version of PostgreSQL. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Soulou.)
Add compress-level range checking for each compress-type. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by gkleen, ViperRu.)

Documentation Improvements:

Add warning about enabling “hierarchical namespace” on Azure storage. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Vojtech Galda, Pluggi, asjonos.)
Add replacement for linefeeds in monitoring example. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by rudonx, gmustdie, Ivan Shelestov.)
Clarify target-action behavior on various PostgreSQL versions. (Contributed by Chris Bandy. Reviewed by David Steele, Anton Kurochkin, Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Anton Kurochkin, Chris Bandy.)
Updates and clarifications to index page. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Add dark mode to the website. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)

v2.43 Release Notes

Bug Fix

Released November 28, 2022

Bug Fixes:

Fix missing reference in diff/incr backup. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Marcel Borger, ulfedf, jaymefSO.)

Improvements:

Add hint when an option is specified without an index. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)

v2.42 Release Notes

Bug Fixes

Released November 22, 2022

Bug Fixes:

Fix memory leak in file bundle backup/restore. (Reviewed by John Morris, Oscar. Reported by Oscar.)
Fix protocol error on short read of remote file. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)

Improvements:

Do not store references for zero-length files when bundling. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Use more generic descriptions for pg_start_backup()/pg_stop_backup(). (Reviewed by Greg Sabino Mullane, David Christensen. Suggested by Greg Sabino Mullane.)

Test Suite Improvements:

Update test.pl --psql-bin option to match command-line help. (Contributed by Koshi Shibagaki. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.41 Release Notes

Backup Annotations

Released September 19, 2022

Bug Fixes:

Fix incorrect time expiration being used for non-default repositories. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Adam Brusselback.)
Fix issue when listing directories recursively with a filter. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Reported by Efremov Egor.)

Features:

Backup key/value annotations. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Adam Berlin.)

Improvements:

Support --set in JSON output for info command. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Anton Kurochkin.)
Allow upload chunk size to be configured for object stores. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Anton Glushakov.)
Update archive.info timestamps after a successful backup. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Alex Richman.)
Move standby timeline check after checkpoint. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, Keith Fiske. Suggested by Keith Fiske.)
Improve warning message on backup resume. (Suggested by Cynthia Shang.)

Documentation Improvements:

Add absolute path for kill in pgbackrest.service. (Suggested by Don Seiler.)

v2.40 Release Notes

OpenSSL 3 Support

Released July 18, 2022

NOTE TO PACKAGERS: This release added an experimental meson build. At this time, packagers should continue to use autoconf/make.

Improvements:

OpenSSL 3 support. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Create snapshot when listing contents of a path. (Reviewed by John Morris, Stephen Frost.)
Force target-timeline=current when restore type=immediate. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Truncate files during delta restore when they are larger than expected. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Disable incremental manifest save when resume=n. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Set backup percent complete to zero before copy start. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Use S3 IsTruncated flag to determine list continuation. (Reviewed by John Morris, Soulou. Suggested by Christian Montagne.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Skip internal options in the configuration reference. (Reported by Francisco Miguel Biete Banon.)

Documentation Improvements:

Add link to PostgreSQL configuration in repository host section. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Julien Cigar.)

Test Suite Improvements:

Add experimental Meson build. (Reviewed by Eli Schwartz, Sam Bassaly.)
Allow any path to be passed to the --test-path option. (Contributed by Andrey Sokolov. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix compile error when DEBUG_EXEC_TIME is defined without DEBUG. (Contributed by Andrey Sokolov. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.39 Release Notes

Verify and File Bundling

Released May 16, 2022

Bug Fixes:

Fix error thrown from FINALLY() causing an infinite loop. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Error on all lock failures except another process holding the lock. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson, Geir Råness. Reported by Geir Råness.)

Features:

Backup file bundling for improved small file support. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson, Stefan Fercot, Chris Bandy.)
Verify command to validate the contents of a repository. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang, Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele, Stefan Fercot.)
PostgreSQL 15 support. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Show backup percent complete in info output. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Auto-select backup for restore command --type=lsn. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, David Steele.)
Suppress existing WAL warning when archive-mode-check is disabled. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add AWS IMDSv2 support. (Contributed by Nuno Pires. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Improvements:

Allow repo-hardlink option to be changed after full backup. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson.)
Increase precision of percent complete logging for backup and restore. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Improve path validation for repo-* commands. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Improve stop command to honor stanza option. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by ragaoua.)
Improve error message for invalid repo-azure-key. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Seth Daniel.)
Add hint to check the log on archive-get/archive-push async error. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson.)
Add ClockError for unexpected clock skew and timezone changes. (Reviewed by Greg Sabino Mullane, Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Greg Sabino Mullane.)
Strip extensions from history manifest before showing in error message. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Add user:group to lock permission error. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Fix incorrect reference to stanza-update in the user guide. (Fixed by Abubakar Mohammed. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix example for repo-gcs-key-type option in configuration reference. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson.)
Fix tls-server-auth example and add clarifications. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson.)

Documentation Improvements:

Simplify messaging around supported versions in the documentation. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, Reid Thompson, Greg Sabino Mullane.)
Add option type descriptions. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add FAQ about backup types and restore speed. (Contributed by David Christensen. Reviewed by Reid Thompson.)
Document required base branch for pull requests. (Contributed by David Christensen. Reviewed by Reid Thompson.)

v2.38 Release Notes

Minor Bug Fixes and Improvements

Released March 6, 2022

IMPORTANT NOTE: Starting with this release, info reports repository size entirely from the data pgBackRest writes to storage. Earlier versions could sometimes detect additional storage compression. This is no longer supported.

Bug Fixes:

Retry errors in S3 batch file delete. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson. Reported by Alex Richman.)
Allow case-insensitive matching of HTTP connection header values. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson. Reported by Rémi Vidier.)

Features:

Add support for AWS S3 server-side encryption using KMS. (Contributed by Christoph Berg. Reviewed by David Steele, Tharindu Amila.)
Add archive-missing-retry option. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Add backup type filter to info command. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Improvements:

Retry on page validation failure during backup. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost, David Christensen.)
Handle TLS servers that do not close connections gracefully. (Reviewed by Rémi Vidier, David Christensen, Stephen Frost.)
Add backup LSNs to info command output. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Automatically strip trailing slashes for repo-ls paths. (Contributed by David Christensen. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Do not retry fatal errors. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson.)
Remove support for PostgreSQL 8.3/8.4. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson, Stefan Fercot.)
Remove logic that tried to determine additional file system compression. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson, Stefan Fercot.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Move repo options in TLS documentation to the global section. (Reported by Anton Kurochkin.)
Remove unused backup-standby option from stanza commands. (Reported by Stefan Fercot.)
Fix typos in help and release notes. (Fixed by Daniel Gustafsson. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Add aliveness check to systemd service configuration. (Suggested by Yogesh Sharma.)
Add FAQ explaining WAL archive suffix. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Note that replications slots are not restored. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele, Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Christophe Courtois.)

v2.37 Release Notes

TLS Server

Released January 3, 2022

IMPORTANT NOTE: In this release, restore reports an error if no backup matches a specified time target. Previously, it logged a warning.

Bug Fixes:

Fix restore delta link mapping when path/file already exists. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson. Reported by Younes Alhroub.)
Fix socket leak on connection retries. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson. Reported by James Coleman.)

Features:

Add TLS server. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost, Reid Thompson, Andrew L’Ecuyer.)
Add --cmd option. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, David Steele. Suggested by Virgile CREVON.)

Improvements:

Check archive immediately after backup start. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson, David Christensen.)
Add timeline and checkpoint checks to backup. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, Reid Thompson.)
Check that clusters are alive and correctly configured during a backup. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Error when restore is unable to find a backup to match the time target. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson, Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by Douglas J Hunley.)
Parse protocol/port in S3/Azure endpoints. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add warning when checkpoint_timeout exceeds db-timeout. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add verb to HTTP error output. (Contributed by Christoph Berg. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Allow y/n arguments for boolean command-line options. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Make backup size logging exactly match info command output. (Contributed by Reid Thompson. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Mahomed Hussein.)

Documentation Improvements:

Display size option default and allowed values with appropriate units. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson.)
Fix typos and improve documentation for the tablespace-map-all option. (Reviewed by Reid Thompson. Suggested by Reid Thompson.)
Remove obsolete statement about future multi-repository support. (Suggested by David Christensen.)

v2.36 Release Notes

Minor Bug Fixes and Improvements

Released November 1, 2021

Bug Fixes:

Allow “global” as a stanza prefix. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Younes Alhroub.)
Fix segfault on invalid GCS key file. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Reported by Henrik Feldt.)

Improvements:

Allow link-map option to create new links. (Reviewed by Don Seiler, Stefan Fercot, Chris Bandy. Suggested by Don Seiler.)
Increase max index allowed for pg/repo options to 256. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Add WebIdentity authentication for AWS S3. (Reviewed by James Callahan, Reid Thompson, Benjamin Blattberg, Andrew L’Ecuyer.)
Report backup file validation errors in backup.info. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add recovery start time to online backup restore log. (Reviewed by Tom Swartz, Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Tom Swartz.)
Report original error and retries on local job failure. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Rename page checksum error to error list in info text output. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Add hints to standby replay timeout message. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Leigh Downs.)

v2.35 Release Notes

Binary Protocol

Released August 23, 2021

IMPORTANT NOTE: This release moved copied-file messages for backup/restore to the detail log level. This reduces output at info level. To keep those messages, set the command log level to detail.

Bug Fixes:

Detect errors in S3 multi-part upload finalize. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Marco Montagna. Reported by Marco Montagna, Lev Kokotov, Anderson A. Mallmann.)
Fix detection of circular symlinks. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Rohit Raveendran.)
Only pass selected repo options to the remote. (Reviewed by David Christensen, Cynthia Shang. Reported by Greg Sabino Mullane, David Christensen.)

Improvements:

Binary protocol. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Automatically create data directory on restore. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Chris Bandy.)
Allow restore --type=lsn. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Suggested by James Coleman.)
Change level of backup/restore copied file logging to detail. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Suggested by Jens Wilke.)
Loop while waiting for checkpoint LSN to reach replay LSN. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Fatih Mencutekin.)
Log backup file total and restore size/file total. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Fix incorrect host names in user guide. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Greg Sabino Mullane.)

Documentation Improvements:

Update contributing documentation and add pull request template. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Rearrange backup documentation in user guide. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Clarify restore --type behavior in command reference. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix documentation and comment typos. (Contributed by Eric Radman. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Test Suite Improvements:

Add check for test path inside repo path. (Reviewed by Greg Sabino Mullane. Suggested by Greg Sabino Mullane.)
Add CodeQL static code analysis. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Update tests to use standard patterns. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.34 Release Notes

PostgreSQL 14 Support

Released June 7, 2021

Bug Fixes:

Fix issues with leftover spool files from a prior restore. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stefan Fercot, Floris van Nee. Reported by Floris van Nee.)
Fix issue when checking links for large numbers of tablespaces. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Avinash Vallarapu. Reported by Avinash Vallarapu.)
Free no longer needed remotes so they do not timeout during restore. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Francisco Miguel Biete Banon.)
Fix help when a valid option is invalid for the specified command. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Cynthia Shang.)

Features:

Add PostgreSQL 14 support. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Add automatic GCS authentication for GCE instances. (Reviewed by Jan Wieck, Daniel Farina.)
Add repo-retention-history option to expire backup history. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, David Steele.)
Add db-exclude option. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Improvements:

Change archive expiration logging from detail to info level. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Remove stanza archive spool path on restore. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stefan Fercot.)
Do not write files atomically or sync paths during backup copy. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost, Stefan Fercot, Cynthia Shang.)

Documentation Improvements:

Update contributing documentation. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele, Stefan Fercot.)
Consolidate RHEL/CentOS user guide into a single document. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Clarify that repo-s3-role is not an ARN. (Contributed by Isaac Yuen. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.33 Release Notes

Multi-Repository and GCS Support

Released April 5, 2021

Bug Fixes:

Fix option warnings breaking async archive-get/archive-push. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Lev Kokotov.)
Fix memory leak in backup during archive copy. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Christian ROUX, Efremov Egor.)
Fix stack overflow in cipher passphrase generation. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by bsiara.)
Fix repo-ls / on S3 repositories. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Lesovsky Alexey.)

Features:

Multiple repository support. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang, David Steele. Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, Stephen Frost.)
GCS support for repository storage. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Daniel Farina.)
Add archive-header-check option. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost, Cynthia Shang. Suggested by Hans-Jürgen Schönig.)

Improvements:

Include recreated system databases during selective restore. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Exclude content-length from S3 signed headers. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Suggested by Brian P Bockelman.)
Consolidate less commonly used repository storage options. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Allow custom config-path default with ./configure --with-configdir. (Contributed by Michael Schout. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Log archive copy during backup. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stefan Fercot.)

Documentation Improvements:

Update reference to include links to user guide examples. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Update selective restore documentation with caveats. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stefan Fercot.)
Add compress-type clarification to archive-copy documentation. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stefan Fercot.)
Add compress-level defaults per compress-type value. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add note about required NFS settings being the same as PostgreSQL. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.32 Release Notes

Repository Commands

Released February 8, 2021

Bug Fixes:

Fix resume after partial delete of backup by prior resume. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Tom Swartz.)

Features:

Add repo-ls command. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stefan Fercot.)
Add repo-get command. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot, David Steele. Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Add archive-mode-check option. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele, Michael Banck.)

Improvements:

Improve archive-get performance. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Documentation Improvements:

Improve expire command documentation. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.31 Release Notes

Minor Bug Fixes and Improvements

Released December 7, 2020

Bug Fixes:

Allow [, #, and space as the first character in database names. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, Cynthia Shang. Reported by Jefferson Alexandre.)
Create standby.signal only on PostgreSQL 12 when restore type is standby. (Fixed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by Keith Fiske.)

Features:

Expire history files. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Report page checksum errors in info command text output. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Add repo-azure-endpoint option. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Brian Peterson. Suggested by Brian Peterson.)
Add pg-database option. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Improvements:

Improve info command output when a stanza is specified but missing. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, David Steele. Suggested by uspen.)
Improve performance of large file lists in backup/restore commands. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Oscar.)
Add retries to PostgreSQL sleep when starting a backup. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Suggested by Vitaliy Kukharik.)

Documentation Improvements:

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

v2.30 Release Notes

PostgreSQL 13 Support

Released October 5, 2020

Bug Fixes:

Error with hints when backup user cannot read pg_settings. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot, Cynthia Shang. Reported by Mohamed Insaf K.)

Features:

PostgreSQL 13 support. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Improvements:

Improve PostgreSQL version identification. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stephen Frost.)
Improve working directory error message. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Add hint about starting the stanza when WAL segment not found. (Contributed by David Christensen. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add hint for protocol version mismatch. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Suggested by loop-evgeny.)

Documentation Improvements:

Add note that pgBackRest versions must match when running remotely. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Suggested by loop-evgeny.)
Move info command text to the reference and link to user guide. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Suggested by Christophe Courtois.)
Update yum repository path for CentOS/RHEL user guide. (Contributed by Heath Lord. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.29 Release Notes

Auto S3 Credentials on AWS

Released August 31, 2020

Bug Fixes:

Suppress errors when closing local/remote processes. The command has already completed. Report a warn message to identify the unexpected condition without reporting a command error. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by argdenis.)
Fix issue with = character in file or database names. (Reviewed by Bastian Wegge, Cynthia Shang. Reported by Brad Nicholson, Bastian Wegge.)

Features:

Automatically retrieve temporary S3 credentials on AWS instances. (Contributed by David Steele, Stephen Frost. Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, David Youatt, Aleš Zelený, Jeanette Bromage.)
Add archive-mode option to disable archiving on restore. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Suggested by Stephen Frost.)

Improvements:

PostgreSQL 13 beta3 support. Later beta changes to control/catalog/WAL versions could break compatibility. pgBackRest updates were planned for each release.
Asynchronous list/remove for S3/Azure storage. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stephen Frost.)
Improve memory usage of unlogged relation detection in manifest build. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stephen Frost, Brad Nicholson, Oscar. Suggested by Oscar, Brad Nicholson.)
Proactively close file descriptors after forking async process. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost, Cynthia Shang.)
Delay backup remote connection close until after archive check. (Contributed by Floris van Nee. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Improve detailed error output. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Improve TLS error reporting. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stephen Frost.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Add none to compress-type option reference and fix example. (Reported by Ugo Bellavance, Don Seiler.)
Add missing azure type in repo-type option reference. (Fixed by Don Seiler. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix typo in repo-cipher-type option reference. (Fixed by Don Seiler. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Clarify that expire must be run regularly when expire-auto is disabled. (Reviewed by Douglas J Hunley. Suggested by Douglas J Hunley.)

v2.28 Release Notes

Azure Repository Storage

Released July 20, 2020

Bug Fixes:

Fix restore --force acting like --force --delta. The affected restore used timestamp and size comparisons instead of overwriting files. It left some files unchanged that needed updates. Normal restore and restore --delta were unaffected. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Features:

Azure support for repository storage. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Don Seiler.)
Add expire-auto option. This allows automatic expiration after a successful backup to be disabled. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, David Steele.)

Improvements:

Asynchronous S3 multipart upload. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Automatic retry for backup, restore, archive-get, and archive-push. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Disable query parallelism in PostgreSQL sessions used for backup control. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
PostgreSQL 13 beta2 support. Later beta changes to control/catalog/WAL versions could break compatibility. pgBackRest updates were planned for each release.
Improve handling of invalid HTTP response status. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Improve error when pg1-path option missing for archive-get command. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Add hint when checksum delta is enabled after a timeline switch. (Reviewed by Matt Bunter, Cynthia Shang.)
Use PostgreSQL instead of postmaster where appropriate. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Fix incorrect example for repo-retention-full-type option. (Reported by Höseyin Sönmez.)
Remove internal commands from HTML and man command references. (Reported by Cynthia Shang.)

Documentation Improvements:

Update PostgreSQL versions used to build user guides. Add version ranges to show which PostgreSQL versions a guide covers, even when examples use one specific version. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Update FAQ for expiring a specific backup set. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Update FAQ to clarify default PITR behavior. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.27 Release Notes

Expiration Improvements and Compression Drivers

Released May 26, 2020

Bug Fixes:

Fix issue checking if file links are contained in path links. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Christophe Cavallié.)
Allow pg-path1 to be optional for synchronous archive-push. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Jerome Peng.)
The expire command now checks if a stop file is present. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Handle missing reason phrase in HTTP response. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Tenuun.)
Increase buffer size for lz4 compression flush. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Eric Radman.)
Ignore pg-host* and repo-host* options for the remote command. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Pavel Suderevsky.)
Fix possibly missing pg1-* options for the remote command. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Andrew L’Ecuyer.)

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. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang, Pierre Ducroquet. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Ad hoc backup expiration. Allow the user to remove a specified backup regardless of retention settings. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Zstandard compression support. Note that setting compress-type=zst will make new backups and archive incompatible (unrestorable) with prior versions of pgBackRest. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
bzip2 compression support. Note that setting compress-type=bz2 will make new backups and archive incompatible (unrestorable) with prior versions of pgBackRest. (Contributed by Stephen Frost. Reviewed by David Steele, Cynthia Shang.)
Add backup/expire running status to the info command. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)

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. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add local MD5 implementation so S3 works when FIPS is enabled. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stephen Frost. Suggested by Brian Almeida, John Kelly.)
PostgreSQL 13 beta1 support. Later beta changes to control/catalog/WAL versions could break compatibility. pgBackRest updates were planned for each release. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Reduce buffer-size default to 1MiB. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost.)
Throw user-friendly error if expire is not run on repository host. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.26 Release Notes

Non-blocking TLS

Released April 20, 2020

Bug Fixes:

Remove empty subexpression from manifest regular expression. This subexpression caused problems on macOS. Other platforms appeared unaffected. (Fixed by David Raftis. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Improvements:

Non-blocking TLS implementation. (Reviewed by Slava Moudry, Cynthia Shang, Stephen Frost.)
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. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
TCP keep-alive options are configurable. (Suggested by Marc Cousin.)
Add io-timeout option. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

v2.25 Release Notes

LZ4 Compression Support

Released March 26, 2020

Features:

Add lz4 compression support. Note that setting compress-type=lz4 will make new backups and archive incompatible (unrestorable) with prior versions of pgBackRest. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
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. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang, Luca Ferrari. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Marc Cousin.)

Improvements:

Improve performance of remote manifest build. (Suggested by Jens Wilke.)
Fix detection of keepalive options on Linux. (Contributed by Marc Cousin. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add configure host detection to set standards flags correctly. (Contributed by Marc Cousin. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Remove compress/compress-level options from commands where unused. Commands such as restore and archive-get previously accepted these options without using them. This release reports an error when they are supplied. Remove the unused options if this error occurs. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Limit backup file copy size to size reported at backup start. If a file grows during backup, WAL replay reconstructs the additional data during recovery. The backup does not need to copy it. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

v2.24 Release Notes

Auto-Select Backup Set for Time Target

Released February 25, 2020

Bug Fixes:

Prevent defunct processes in asynchronous archive commands. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Reported by Adam Brusselback, ejberdecia.)
Error when archive-get/archive-push/restore are not run on a PostgreSQL host. (Reviewed by Stephen Frost. Reported by Jesper St John.)
Read HTTP content to eof when size/encoding not specified. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Christian ROUX.)
Fix resume when the resumable backup was created by Perl. The backup should be ignored in this case. However, C code could not load the partial Perl manifest because the formats differed slightly. Add checks to detect this case and continue. (Reported by Kacey Holston.)

Features:

Auto-select backup set on restore when time target is specified. Select automatically only when --set is absent. If no backup set matches the target time, use the latest backup set, which is the default. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Improvements:

Skip pg_internal.init temp file during backup. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Suggested by Michael Paquier.)
Add more validations to the manifest on backup. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Documentation Improvements:

Prevent lock-bot from adding comments to locked issues. (Suggested by Christoph Berg.)

v2.23 Release Notes

Bug Fix

Released January 27, 2020

Bug Fixes:

Fix missing files corrupting the manifest. If PostgreSQL removed a file during backup, the next file might not be copied or updated in the manifest. A file missing from the standby could cause the same problem. Restoring such a backup produced an error. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Vitaliy Kukharik.)

Improvements:

Use pkg-config instead of xml2-config for libxml2 build options. (Contributed by David Steele, Adrian Vondendriesch.)
Validate checksums are set in the manifest on backup/restore. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

v2.22 Release Notes

Bug Fix

Released January 21, 2020

Bug Fixes:

Fix error in timeline conversion. The timeline is required to verify WAL segments in the archive after a backup. Conversion used base 10 instead of 16. This caused errors for timelines ≥ 0xA. (Reported by Lukas Ertl, Eric Veldhuyzen.)

v2.21 Release Notes

C Migration Complete

Released January 15, 2020

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]. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Urs Kramer.)
Fix handling of \ in filenames. Manifest checksum calculation escaped \ incorrectly, which prevented manifest loading. Cluster filenames rarely contain \, so a serious production problem was unlikely.

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. (Contributed by Mike Palmiotto. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Allow path-style URIs in S3 driver.

Improvements:

The backup command is implemented entirely in C. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

v2.20 Release Notes

Bug Fixes

Released December 12, 2019

Bug Fixes:

Fix archive-push/archive-get when PGDATA is symlinked. These commands used cwd() as PGDATA. For a symlinked PGDATA, it differed from the configured pgBackRest path. If the paths differ, call chdir() with the configured path. Then verify that cwd() matches its first result. (Reported by Stephen Frost, Milosz Suchy.)
Fix reference list when backup.info is reconstructed in expire command. At this release, backup still used the Perl reconstruction code. The issue required both conditions: 1) a backup was missing from backup.info; 2) expire ran directly instead of automatically after backup. This combination was unlikely in production.
Fix segfault on unexpected EOF in gzip decompression. (Reported by Stephen Frost.)

v2.19 Release Notes

C Migrations and Bug Fixes

Released November 12, 2019

Bug Fixes:

Fix remote timeout in delta restore. During a delta restore of a mostly unchanged cluster, the remote could time out. This occurred if no repository files were fetched within protocol-timeout. Add keep-alives to prevent this timeout. (Reported by James Sewell, Jens Wilke.)
Fix handling of repeated HTTP headers. Treat repeated HTTP headers as one comma-separated header. Earlier versions reported an error. (Reported by donicrosby.)

Improvements:

JSON output from the info command is no longer pretty-printed. JSON without linefeeds is easier for monitoring systems to ingest. For formatted output, use an external tool such as jq. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
The check command is implemented entirely in C. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Document how to contribute to pgBackRest. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang, David Steele.)
Document maximum version for auto-stop option. (Contributed by Brad Nicholson. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Test Suite Improvements:

Fix container test path being used when --vm=none. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)
Fix mismatched timezone in expect test. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)
Don’t autogenerate embedded libc code by default. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)

v2.18 Release Notes

PostgreSQL 12 Support

Released October 1, 2019

Features:

PostgreSQL 12 support.
Add info command set option for detailed text output. Details include databases available for selective restore. They also list tablespaces and symlinks with their default destinations. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Stephen Frost, ejberdecia.)
Add standby restore type. For PostgreSQL < 12, this type adds standby_mode=on to recovery.conf. For PostgreSQL ≥ 12, it creates standby.signal. This provides one interface across PostgreSQL versions. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Improvements:

The restore command is implemented entirely in C. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Documentation Improvements:

Document the relationship between db-timeout and protocol-timeout. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by James Chanco Jr.)
Add documentation clarifications regarding standby repositories. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add FAQ for time-based Point-in-Time Recovery. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v2.17 Release Notes

C Migrations and Bug Fixes

Released September 3, 2019

Bug Fixes:

Improve slow manifest build for very large quantities of tables/segments. (Reported by Jens Wilke.)
Fix exclusions for special files. (Reported by CluelessTechnologist, Janis Puris, Rachid Broum.)

Improvements:

The stanza-create/update/delete commands are implemented entirely in C. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
The start/stop commands are implemented entirely in C. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Create log directories/files with 0750/0640 mode. (Suggested by Damiano Albani.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Fix yum.p.o package being installed when custom package specified. (Reported by Joe Ayers, John Harvey.)

Documentation Improvements:

Build pgBackRest as an unprivileged user. (Suggested by Laurenz Albe.)

v2.16 Release Notes

C Migrations and Bug Fixes

Released August 5, 2019

Bug Fixes:

Retry S3 RequestTimeTooSkewed errors instead of immediately terminating. (Reported by sean0101n, Tim Garton, Jesper St John, Aleš Zelený.)
Fix incorrect handling of transfer-encoding response to HEAD request. (Reported by Pavel Suderevsky.)
Fix scoping violations exposed by optimizations in gcc 9. (Reported by Christian Lange, Ned T. Crigler.)

Features:

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

Improvements:

The local command for backup is implemented entirely in C. (Contributed by David Steele, Cynthia Shang.)
The check command is implemented partly in C. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

v2.15 Release Notes

C Implementation of Expire

Released June 25, 2019

Bug Fixes:

Fix archive retention expiring too aggressively. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by Mohamad El-Rifai.)

Improvements:

The expire command is implemented entirely in C. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
The local command for restore is implemented entirely in C.
Remove hard-coded PostgreSQL user so $PGUSER works. (Suggested by Julian Zhang, Janis Puris.)
Honor configure --prefix option. (Suggested by Daniel Westermann.)
Rename repo-s3-verify-ssl option to repo-s3-verify-tls. Prefer the new name because pgBackRest supports no SSL protocol versions; all are considered insecure. The old name remains accepted.

Documentation Improvements:

Add FAQ to the documentation. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Use wal_level=replica in the documentation for PostgreSQL ≥ 9.6. (Suggested by Patrick McLaughlin.)

v2.14 Release Notes

Bug Fix and Improvements

Released May 20, 2019

Bug Fixes:

Fix segfault when process-max > 8 for archive-push/archive-get. (Reported by Jens Wilke.)

Improvements:

Bypass database checks when stanza-delete issued with force. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by hatifnatt.)
Add configure script for improved multi-platform support.

Documentation Features:

Add user guides for CentOS/RHEL 6/7.

v2.13 Release Notes

Bug Fixes

Released April 18, 2019

Bug Fixes:

Fix zero-length reads causing problems for IO filters that did not expect them. (Reported by brunre01, Jens Wilke, Tomasz Kontusz, guruguruguru.)
Fix reliability of error reporting from local/remote processes.
Fix Posix/CIFS error messages reporting the wrong filename on write/sync/close.

v2.12 Release Notes

C Implementation of Archive Push

Released April 11, 2019

IMPORTANT NOTE: The new TLS/SSL implementation forbids dots in S3 bucket names per RFC-2818. This security fix is required for compliant hostname verification.

Bug Fixes:

Fix issues when a path option is / terminated. (Reported by Marc Cousin.)
Fix issues when log-level-file=off is set for the archive-get command. (Reported by Brad Nicholson.)
Fix C code to recognize host:port option format like Perl does. (Reported by Kyle Nevins.)
Fix issues with remote/local command logging options.

Improvements:

The archive-push command is implemented entirely in C.
Increase process-max limit to 999. (Suggested by Rakshitha-BR.)
Improve error message when an S3 bucket name contains dots.

Documentation Improvements:

Clarify that S3-compatible object stores are supported. (Suggested by Magnus Hagander.)

v2.11 Release Notes

C Implementation of Archive Get

Released March 11, 2019

Bug Fixes:

Fix possible truncated WAL segments when an error occurs mid-write. (Reported by blogh.)
Fix info command missing WAL min/max when stanza specified. (Fixed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix non-compliant JSON for options passed from C to Perl. (Reported by Leo Khomenko.)

Improvements:

The archive-get command is implemented entirely in C.
Enable socket keep-alive on older Perl versions. (Contributed by Marc Cousin. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Error when parameters are passed to a command that does not accept parameters. (Suggested by Jason O’Donnell.)
Add hints when unable to find a WAL segment in the archive. (Suggested by Hans-Jürgen Schönig.)
Improve error when hostname cannot be found in a certificate. (Suggested by James Badger.)
Add additional options to backup.manifest for debugging purposes. (Contributed by blogh. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Update default documentation version to PostgreSQL 10.

v2.10 Release Notes

Bug Fixes

Released February 9, 2019

Bug Fixes:

Add unimplemented S3 driver method required for archive-get. (Reported by mibiio.)
Fix check for improperly configured pg-path. (Reported by James Chanco Jr.)

v2.09 Release Notes

Minor Improvements and Bug Fixes

Released January 30, 2019

Bug Fixes:

Fix issue with multiple async status files causing a hard error. (Reported by Vidhya Gurumoorthi, Joe Ayers, Douglas J Hunley.)

Improvements:

The info command is implemented entirely in C. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
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. (Contributed by Douglas J Hunley. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Update address lookup in C TLS client to use modern methods. (Suggested by Bruno Friedmann.)
Include Posix-compliant header for strcasecmp() and fd_set. (Suggested by ucando.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Fix hard-coded repository path. (Reported by Heath Lord.)

Documentation Improvements:

Clarify that encryption is always performed client-side. (Suggested by Bruce Burdick.)
Add examples for building a documentation host.
Allow if in manifest variables, lists, and list items.

v2.08 Release Notes

Minor Improvements and Bug Fixes

Released January 2, 2019

Bug Fixes:

Remove request for S3 object info directly after putting it. (Reported by Matt Kunkel.)
Correct archive-get-queue-max to be size type. (Reported by Ronan Dunklau.)
Add error message when current user uid/gid does not map to a name. (Reported by Camilo Aguilar.)
Error when --target-action=shutdown specified for PostgreSQL < 9.5.

Improvements:

Set TCP keepalives on S3 connections. (Suggested by Ronan Dunklau.)
Reorder info command text output so most recent backup is output last. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Ryan Lambert.)
Change file ownership only when required.
Redact authentication header when throwing S3 errors. (Suggested by Brad Nicholson.)

Documentation Improvements:

Clarify when target-action is effective and PostgreSQL version support. (Suggested by Keith Fiske.)
Clarify that region/endpoint must be configured correctly for the bucket. (Suggested by Pritam Barhate.)
Add documentation for building the documentation.

v2.07 Release Notes

Automatic Backup Checksum Delta

Released November 16, 2018

Bug Fixes:

Fix issue with archive-push-queue-max not being honored on connection error. (Reported by Lardière Sébastien.)
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. (Reported by vthriller.)

Features:

Automatically enable backup checksum delta when anomalies (e.g. timeline switch) are detected. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Improvements:

Retry all S3 5xx errors rather than just 500 internal errors. (Suggested by Craig A. James.)

v2.06 Release Notes

Checksum Delta Backup and PostgreSQL 11 Support

Released October 15, 2018

Bug Fixes:

Fix missing URI encoding in S3 driver. (Reported by Dan Farrell.)
Fix incorrect error message for duplicate options in configuration files. (Reported by Jesper St John.)
Fix incorrectly reported error return in info logging. The archive-get return code 1 was logged as an error at info level. Operation was otherwise correct.

Features:

Add checksum delta for incremental backups. Checksum delta backups uses checksums rather than timestamps to determine if files have changed. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
PostgreSQL 11 support, including configurable WAL segment size.

Improvements:

Ignore all files in a linked tablespace directory except the subdirectory for the current version of PostgreSQL. Previously, other files not owned by the PostgreSQL user caused an error.
Improve info command to display the stanza cipher type. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Douglas J Hunley.)
Improve support for special characters in filenames.
Allow delta option to be specified in the pgBackRest configuration file. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Use command in authorized_hosts to improve SSH security. (Suggested by Stephen Frost, Magnus Hagander.)
List allowable values for the buffer-size option in the configuration reference. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Stéphane Schildknecht.)

v2.05 Release Notes

Environment Variable Options and Exclude Temporary/Unlogged Relations

Released August 31, 2018

Bug Fixes:

Fix issue where relative links in $PGDATA could be stored in the backup with the wrong path. Absolute links were unaffected. Other checks detected relative tablespace links. (Reported by Cynthia Shang.)
Remove incompletely implemented online option from the check command. The command checks whether archiving and backups work correctly, which requires online operation. (Reported by Jason O’Donnell.)
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. (Reported by Douglas J Hunley.)
Fix issue when a boolean option (e.g. delta) was specified more than once. (Reported by Yogesh Sharma.)

Features:

Allow any option to be set in an environment variable. This includes previously command-line-only options, such as stanza. It also includes secret options prohibited on the command line, such as 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. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Allow arbitrary directories and/or files to be excluded from a backup. Incorrect exclusions can make backups inconsistent. Read the --exclude documentation carefully before use. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Add log-subprocess option to allow file logging for local and remote subprocesses.
PostgreSQL 11 Beta 3 support.

Improvements:

Allow zero-size files in backup manifest to reference a prior manifest regardless of timestamp delta. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Improve asynchronous archive-get/archive-push performance by directly checking status files. (Contributed by Stephen Frost. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Improve error message when a command is missing the stanza option. (Suggested by Sarah Conway.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Fix invalid log level in log-path option reference. (Reported by Camilo Aguilar.)

Documentation Improvements:

Stop trying to arrange contributors in release.xml by last/first name. Release notes always preserve contributor names as supplied. Internal IDs previously used inferred last/first names, which can be difficult to determine reliably. Inspired by Christophe’s PostgresOpen 2017 talk, “Human Beings Do Not Have a Primary Key”. (Suggested by Christophe Pettus.)

Test Suite Improvements:

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

v2.04 Release Notes

Critical Bug Fix for Backup Resume

Released July 5, 2018

IMPORTANT NOTE: This release fixed a critical backup resume bug. Treat all resumed backups from earlier releases as inconsistent. After a failed backup, pgBackRest resumes unless resume=n is set. Check backup logs for the exact message “aborted backup of same type exists, will be cleaned to remove invalid files and resumed”. If present, do not restore that backup or any backup in the same set.

Check restore logs to see whether a resumed backup was restored. If so, the cluster might contain inconsistent data.

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. (Reported by David Youatt, Yogesh Sharma, Stephen Frost.)
Fix error in selective restore when only one user database exists in the cluster. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by Nj Baliyan.)
Fix non-compliant ISO-8601 timestamp format in S3 authorization headers. AWS and some gateways accepted space-padded hours. Others required zero-padded hours. (Fixed by Andrew Schwartz. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Features:

PostgreSQL 11 Beta 2 support.

Improvements:

Improve the HTTP client to set content-length to 0 when not specified by the server. S3 and its gateways always set content-length or transfer-encoding. HTTP 1.1 does not require either header, and proxies such as HAProxy might omit both. (Suggested by Adam K. Sumner.)
Set search_path = 'pg_catalog' on PostgreSQL connections. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)

Documentation Improvements:

Create a new section to describe building pgBackRest and build on a separate host.
Add sample S3 policy to restrict bucket privileges. (Suggested by Douglas J Hunley, Jason O’Donnell.)

v2.03 Release Notes

Single Executable to Deploy

Released May 22, 2018

Bug Fixes:

Fix potential buffer overrun in error message handling. (Reported by Lætitia.)
Fix archive write lock being taken for the synchronous archive-get command. (Reported by uspen.)

Improvements:

Embed exported C functions and Perl modules directly into the pgBackRest executable.
Use time_t instead of __time_t for better portability. (Suggested by Nick Floersch.)
Print total runtime in milliseconds at command end.

v2.02 Release Notes

Parallel Asynchronous Archive Get and Configuration Includes

Released May 6, 2018

Bug Fixes:

Fix directory syncs running recursively when only the specified directory should be synced. (Reported by Craig A. James.)
Fix archive-copy throwing “path not found” error for incr/diff backups. (Reported by yummyliu, Vitaliy Kukharik.)
Fix failure in manifest build when two or more files in PGDATA are linked to the same directory. (Reported by Vitaliy Kukharik.)
Fix delta restore failing when a linked file is missing.
Fix rendering of key/value and list options in help. (Reported by Clinton Adams.)

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. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Add repo-s3-token option to allow temporary credentials tokens to be configured. At this release, pgBackRest could not request new credentials. The complete command, such as backup or restore, had to finish before expiration. (Contributed by Yogesh Sharma. Reviewed by David Steele.)

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. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Make backup/restore path sync more efficient. Scanning directories with many small tables can be expensive. Use the path list in the backup manifest for 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.

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Update docs with 32-bit support and caveats. 32-bit support was added in v1.26. (Reported by Viorel Tabara.)

Documentation Improvements:

Add monitoring examples using PostgreSQL and jq. (Suggested by Stephen Frost, Brian Faherty.)
Add example of command section usage to archiving configuration. (Suggested by Christophe Courtois.)
Remove documentation describing info --output=json as experimental.
Update out-of-date description for the spool-path option.

Test Suite Features:

Use lcov for C unit test coverage reporting. Replace Devel::Cover, which omitted branch coverage from converted gcov reports. Incomplete module branch coverage now generates an error. The report shows unit-test coverage only when statement or branch coverage is incomplete.

v2.01 Release Notes

Minor Bug Fixes and Improvements

Released March 19, 2018

Bug Fixes:

Fix --target-action and --recovery-option options being reported as invalid when restoring with --type=immediate. (Reported by Brad Nicholson.)
Immediately error when a secure option (e.g. repo1-s3-key) is passed on the command line. pgBackRest did not pass secure options to subprocesses, which caused an unclear error. The new error explains the problem and provides correction hints. Remove secure options that cannot be supplied on the command line from command documentation. (Reported by Brad Nicholson.)
Fix issue passing --no-config to embedded Perl. (Reported by Ibrahim Edib Kokdemir.)
Fix exit errors in local/remote processes when log-level-stderr > warn. Unexpected stderr output caused these errors. Limit subprocess logging to error, because these processes do not need to report warnings. (Reported by Clinton Adams.)
Fix manifest test in the check command when tablespaces are present. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by Thomas Flatley.)

Improvements:

Error when multiple arguments are set in the config file for an option that does not accept multiple arguments. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Remove extraneous sudo commands from src/Makefile. (Contributed by Adrian Vondendriesch. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Show index in examples for indexed options, i.e. repo-*, pg-*. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)
Simplify table of contents on command page by only listing commands. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)
Remove references to the C library being optional.

Test Suite 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__.

v2.00 Release Notes

Performance Improvements for Archive Push

Released February 23, 2018

Features:

Implement part of archive-push in C. This substantially speeds PostgreSQL archive_command processing of status messages from the asynchronous archive process. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Improvements:

Improve check command to verify that the backup manifest can be built. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Improve performance of HTTPS client. Buffering now includes socket pending bytes, when present, instead of relying only on select(). Previously, final bytes sometimes remained unflushed until the connection 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. Reset options from pgbackrest.conf to their defaults without creating a separate configuration file for a specific operation.
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.

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. (Suggested by David Youatt.)

v1.29 Release Notes

Critical Bug Fix for Backup Resume

Released July 5, 2018

Check restore logs to see whether a resumed backup was restored. If so, the cluster might contain inconsistent data.

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. (Reported by David Youatt, Yogesh Sharma, Stephen Frost.)
Fix non-compliant ISO-8601 timestamp format in S3 authorization headers. AWS and some gateways accepted space-padded hours. Others required zero-padded hours. (Fixed by Andrew Schwartz. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix directory syncs running recursively when only the specified directory should be synced. (Reported by Craig A. James.)
Fix --target-action and --recovery-option options being reported as invalid when restoring with --type=immediate. (Reported by Brad Nicholson.)
Fix archive-copy throwing “path not found” error for incr/diff backups. (Reported by yummyliu, Vitaliy Kukharik.)
Fix failure in manifest build when two or more files in PGDATA are linked to the same directory. (Reported by Vitaliy Kukharik.)
Fix delta restore failing when a linked file was missing.
Fix error in selective restore when only one user database exists in the cluster. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by Nj Baliyan.)

Improvements:

Improve the HTTP client to set content-length to 0 when not specified by the server. S3 and its gateways always set content-length or transfer-encoding. HTTP 1.1 does not require either header, and proxies such as HAProxy might omit both. (Suggested by Adam K. Sumner.)
Improve performance of HTTPS client. Buffering now includes socket pending bytes, when present, instead of relying only on select(). Previously, final bytes sometimes remained unflushed until the connection 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 directories with many small tables can be expensive. Use the path list in the backup manifest for syncs instead of scanning the backup/restore path. Remove recursive path sync functionality since it is no longer used.

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Update docs with 32-bit support and caveats. 32-bit support was added in v1.26. (Reported by Viorel Tabara.)

Documentation Improvements:

Clarify that S3 buckets must be created by the user. (Suggested by David Youatt.)
Update out-of-date description for the spool-path option.

v1.28 Release Notes

Stanza Delete

Released February 1, 2018

Bug Fixes:

Fixed inability to restore a single database contained in a tablespace using –db-include. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by Chiranjeevi Ravilla.)
Ensure latest db-id is selected on when matching archive.info to backup.info. This handles duplicate system-id and db-version values, for example after reverting a pg_upgrade. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by Adam K. Sumner.)
Fixed overly chatty error message when reporting an invalid command. (Reported by Jason O’Donnell.)

Features:

Add stanza-delete command to cleanup unused stanzas. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Magnus Hagander.)

Improvements:

Improve stanza-create command so that it does not error when the stanza already exists. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Update stanza-create --force documentation to urge caution when using. (Suggested by Jason O’Donnell.)

v1.27 Release Notes

Bug Fixes and Documentation

Released December 19, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue that suppressed locality errors for backup and restore. With a backup host configured, backups must run there and restores must run on the database host. An alternative configuration that ignores the remote host can override this restriction. (Reported by Lardière Sébastien.)
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. (Reported by Adam Brusselback.)
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. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by Stephen Frost.)

Documentation Features:

Document the relationship between the archive-copy and archive-check options. (Suggested by Markus Nullmeier.)
Improve archive-copy reference documentation.

v1.26 Release Notes

Repository Encryption

Released November 21, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue that could cause copying large manifests to fail during restore. (Reported by Craig A. James.)
Fixed incorrect WAL offset for 32-bit architectures. (Fixed by Javier Wilson. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fixed an issue retrieving WAL for old database versions. After stanza-upgrade, backups from the previous version should still support restore and recovery with archive-get. However, archive-get checked only the latest db version/id and failed. Also fix repeated db version/id values in history. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by Clinton Adams.)
Fixed an issue with invalid backup groups being set correctly on restore. When a group cannot be mapped to a name, the backup manifest stores false. Restore then uses the group from the owner of $PGDATA, or the current user’s group if unavailable. Previously, this logic assigned the selected group to the user field. It left the group undefined and set the user incorrectly. (Reported by Jeff McCormick.)
Fixed an issue passing parameters to remotes. With multiple databases configured, pgBackRest passed the db1 path, port, and socket path regardless of the selected database. (Reported by uspen.)

Features:

Repository encryption support. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang, David Steele.)

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.

Documentation Features:

Add template to improve initial information gathered for issue submissions. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Clarify usage of the archive-timeout option and describe how it is distinct from the PostgreSQL archive_timeout setting. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Suggested by Keith Fiske.)

Test Suite Features:

Automated tests for 32-bit i386/i686 architecture.

v1.25 Release Notes

S3 Performance Improvements

Released October 24, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fix custom settings for compress-level option being ignored. (Reported by Jens Wilke.)
Remove error when overlapping timelines are detected. Overlapping timelines are valid in many Point-in-Time-Recovery (PITR) scenarios. (Reported by blogh.)
Fix instances where database-id was not rendered as an integer in JSON info output. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele. Reported by Jason O’Donnell.)

Features:

Improve performance of list requests on S3. Use the initial literal part of a filter expression as the search prefix. This often reduces request size enough to avoid rate limiting. (Suggested by Mihail Shvein.)

Test Suite Features:

Add I/O performance tests.

v1.24 Release Notes

New Backup Exclusions

Released September 28, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue where warnings were being emitted in place of lower priority log messages during backup from standby initialization. (Reported by uspen.)
Fixed an issue where some db-* options (e.g. db-port) were not being passed to remotes. (Reported by uspen.)

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.

Improvements:

Open the log file after the asynchronous process fully separates from the main process. This prevents the main process from writing to that file. (Suggested by Jens Wilke.)

Documentation Features:

Add passwordless SSH configuration.

Documentation Improvements:

Rename master to primary in documentation to align with PostgreSQL convention.

v1.23 Release Notes

Multiple Standbys and PostgreSQL 10 Support

Released September 3, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue that could cause compression to abort on growing files. (Reported by Jesper St John, Aleksandr Rogozin.)
Fixed an issue with keep-alives not being sent to the remote from the local process. (Reported by William Cox.)

Features:

Up to seven standbys can be configured for backup from standby. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
PostgreSQL 10 support.
Allow content-length (in addition to chunked encoding) when reading XML data to improve compatibility with third-party S3 gateways. (Suggested by Victor Gdalevich.)

Improvements:

Increase HTTP timeout for S3.
Add HTTP retries to harden against transient S3 network errors.

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Fixed document generation to include section summaries on the Configuration page. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v1.22 Release Notes

Fixed S3 Retry

Released August 9, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fixed authentication issue in S3 retry.

v1.21 Release Notes

Improved Info Output and SSH Port Option

Released August 8, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Recreate archive_status during restore for PostgreSQL 8.3. Later PostgreSQL versions recreate it automatically. (Reported by Stephen Frost.)
Fixed an issue that could cause the empty archive directory for an old PostgreSQL version to be left behind after a stanza-upgrade. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Features:

Modify info text and JSON output to show the archive ID and minimum/maximum archived WAL. Include the current database cluster version and any previous versions. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Added --backup-ssh-port and --db-ssh-port options to support non-default SSH ports. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Improvements:

Retry when S3 returns an internal error (500).

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. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)

v1.20 Release Notes

Critical 8.3/8.4 Bug Fix

Released June 27, 2017

IMPORTANT NOTE: PostgreSQL 8.3 and 8.4 installations utilizing tablespaces should upgrade immediately from any v1 release and run a full backup. A bug prevented tablespaces from being backed up on these versions only. PostgreSQL ≥ 9.0

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. (Reported by Adrian Vondendriesch.)

Features:

Add s3-repo-ca-path and s3-repo-ca-file for custom CAs and systems where IO::Socket::SSL cannot find CAs automatically, such as RHEL7. (Suggested by Scott Frazer.)

Test Suite Features:

Add documentation builds to CI.

v1.19 Release Notes

S3 Support

Released June 12, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fixed the info command so the WAL archive min/max displayed is for the current database version. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix backup to reset backup-standby when the standby is unconfigured or unreachable. The backup then runs on the primary. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fixed config warnings raised from a remote process causing errors in the master process. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Features:

Amazon S3 repository support. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Changed invalid max-archive-mb option in configuration reference to archive-queue-max.
Fixed missing sudo in installation section. (Fixed by Lætitia. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v1.18 Release Notes

Stanza Upgrade, Refactoring, and Locking Improvements

Released April 12, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fix write locks created by read-only operations with local workers, such as restore. These locks could interfere with parallel archive-push. (Reported by Jens Wilke.)

Features:

Add stanza-upgrade to update a stanza after a PostgreSQL major version upgrade. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Added validation of pgbackrest.conf to display warnings if options are not valid or are not in the correct section. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Improvements:

Simplify locking scheme. Only the master process now holds write locks for archive-push and backup. Previously, all local and remote workers held them.
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. (Suggested by Yogesh Sharma.)
Renumber return codes between 25 and 125 to avoid PostgreSQL interpreting some as fatal signal exceptions. (Suggested by Yogesh Sharma.)

v1.17 Release Notes

Page Checksum Bug Fix

Released March 13, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue where newly initialized (but unused) pages would cause page checksum warnings. (Reported by Stephen Frost.)

v1.16 Release Notes

Page Checksum Improvements, CI, and Package Testing

Released March 2, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue where tables over 1GB would report page checksum warnings after the first segment. (Reported by Stephen Frost.)
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. (Reported by blogh.)

Test Suite Features:

Continuous integration using travis-ci.
Automated builds of Debian packages for all supported distributions.

v1.15 Release Notes

Refactoring and Bug Fixes

Released February 13, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fix a v1.13 regression that could fail backups when files disappeared during manifest creation, for example after tables were dropped. (Reported by Navid Golpayegani.)

v1.14 Release Notes

Refactoring and Bug Fixes

Released February 13, 2017

Bug Fixes:

Fix archive-push errors that were not retried. They caused repeated PostgreSQL errors until the .error file was deleted manually. (Reported by Jens Wilke.)
Fix a parallel archive race condition. Simultaneous attempts to create the same path caused an error. (Reported by Jens Wilke.)

Improvements:

Improved performance of wal archive min/max provided by the info command. (Suggested by Jens Wilke.)

Documentation Features:

Updated async archiving documentation to more accurately describe how the new method works and how it differs from the old method. (Suggested by Jens Wilke.)

v1.13 Release Notes

Parallel Archiving, Stanza Create, Improved Info and Check

Released February 5, 2017

IMPORTANT NOTE: This asynchronous archive implementation stopped copying WAL to a separate queue. After upgrading to 1.13, WAL remaining in the old queue would be abandoned and not archived. Before upgrading, stop archiving with archive_command = false. Run pgbackrest --stanza=[stanza-name] archive-push to drain the queue, and wait for completion. Check that [spool-path]/archive/[stanza-name]/out is empty. Then install 1.13 and restore the original archive_command.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This release made stanza-create mandatory before backups or archiving for a new stanza. Existing stanzas did not need this command.

Bug Fixes:

Fixed const assignment giving compiler warning in C library. (Fixed by Adrian Vondendriesch. Reviewed by David Steele.)
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(). (Reported by Leonardo GG Avellar.)
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.

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. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Allow check to run on a standby. Only basic checks run because a replica cannot execute pg_switch_xlog(). (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Added archive and backup WAL ranges to the info command.
Added warning to update pg_tablespace.spclocation when remapping tablespaces in PostgreSQL < 9.2. (Contributed by blogh. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Remove remote lock requirements for the archive-get, restore, info, and check commands since they are read-only operations. (Suggested by Michael Vitale.)

Improvements:

Log file banner is not output until the first log entry is written. (Suggested by Jens Wilke.)
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. (Contributed by Adrian Vondendriesch. Reviewed by David Steele.)
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. (Suggested by Yogesh Sharma.)

Documentation Features:

Added documentation to the User Guide for the process-max option. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v1.12 Release Notes

Page Checksums, Configuration, and Bug Fixes

Released December 12, 2016

IMPORTANT NOTE: Earlier releases accepted command-line options that were invalid for the selected command. This release reports errors for those options. Check your command lines carefully to prevent disruption.

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. Previously, these options were ignored without changing behavior. They now produce an error to prevent confusion. (Reported by Nikhilchandra Kulkarni.)
Fixed an issue where internal symlinks were not being created for tablespaces in the repository. This affected manual, in-place cluster startup from filesystem snapshots. Normal backups and restores were unaffected.
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 correct, so failed processes did not appear successful. (Reported by Adrian Vondendriesch.)
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. (Reported by Michael Vitale.)

Features:

Add --checksum-page to validate data-file page checksums on PostgreSQL >= 9.3 when cluster checksums are enabled. This requires a C library that might initially be absent from OS packages. Enable the option automatically when both the library and cluster checksums are available. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)
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 preserves pgBackRest functions but omits latest and internal tablespace symlinks. Their absence affects manual, in-place cluster startup from 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. (Suggested by Jens Wilke.)

Improvements:

Copy pg_control with other files instead of separately at the end. The backup command does not need special ordering. The restore command copies to a temporary file and renames it at completion.

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.

v1.11 Release Notes

Bug Fix for Asynchronous Archiving Efficiency

Released November 17, 2016

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue where asynchronous archiving was transferring one file per execution instead of transferring files in batches. The v1.09 regression reduced efficiency only. Asynchronous mode still archived all WAL segments correctly. (Reported by Stephen Frost.)

v1.10 Release Notes

Stanza Creation and Minor Bug Fixes

Released November 8, 2016

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. (Reported by Nikhilchandra Kulkarni.)

Features:

Added the stanza-create command to formalize creation of stanzas in the repository. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Improvements:

Removed extraneous use lib directives from Perl modules. (Suggested by Devrim Gündüz.)

v1.09 Release Notes

9.6 Support, Configurability, and Bug Fixes

Released October 10, 2016

Bug Fixes:

Fixed the check command to prevent an error message from being logged if the backup directory does not exist. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fixed error message to properly display the archive command when an invalid archive command is detected. (Reported by Jason O’Donnell.)
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. The queue then required manual action, such as a direct archive-push call, to clear it. PostgreSQL still receives errors when space is insufficient. However, the asynchronous process now starts to free space. (Reported by Jens Wilke.)
Fix remote timeouts during local checksum calculation in resume or restore. Without file transfers, the remote became idle. (Reported by Jens Wilke.)

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. (Suggested by Jens Wilke.)
Added the log-level-stderr option to control whether console log messages are sent to stderr or stdout. The new default, warn, changes previous behavior. Set log-level-stderr=off to preserve the old behavior. (Suggested by Sascha Biberhofer.)
Set application_name to "pgBackRest [command]" for database connections. (Suggested by Jens Wilke.)
Check that archive_mode is enabled when archive-check option enabled.

Improvements:

Clarified error message when unable to acquire pgBackRest advisory lock to make it clear that it is not a PostgreSQL backup lock. (Suggested by Jens Wilke.)
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. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v1.08 Release Notes

Bug Fixes and Log Improvements

Released September 14, 2016

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue where local processes were not disconnecting when complete and could later timeout. (Reported by Todd Vernick.)
Fixed an issue where the protocol layer could timeout while waiting for WAL segments to arrive in the archive. (Reported by Todd Vernick.)

Improvements:

Cache file log output until the file is created to create a more complete log.

v1.07 Release Notes

Thread to Process Conversion and Bug Fixes

Released September 7, 2016

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 by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
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. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

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. (Suggested by Jens Wilke.)
Additional warnings when archive retention settings may not have the intended effect or would allow indefinite retention. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Experimental support for non-exclusive backups in PostgreSQL 9.6 rc1. Later release candidates could change control/catalog/WAL versions and break compatibility. pgBackRest updates were planned for each release.

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Fixed minor documentation reproducibility issues related to binary paths.

Documentation Features:

Documentation for archive retention. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v1.06 Release Notes

Backup from Standby and Bug Fixes

Released August 25, 2016

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue where a tablespace link that referenced another link would not produce an error, but instead skip the tablespace entirely. (Reported by Michael Vitale.)
Fixed an issue where options that should not allow multiple values could be specified multiple times in pgbackrest.conf without an error being raised. (Reported by Michael Vitale.)
Fixed an issue where the protocol-timeout option was not automatically increased when the db-timeout option was increased. (Reported by Todd Vernick.)

Features:

Backup from a standby cluster. A primary connection remains necessary to start/stop backup and copy unreplicated files. Most files come from the standby to reduce primary load.
More flexible configuration for databases. Configure both primary and standby on the backup server. pgBackRest detects the primary automatically. With a separate backup server, failover then requires no backup configuration changes.
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. Later beta changes to control/catalog/WAL versions could break compatibility. pgBackRest updates were planned for each release.

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.

v1.05 Release Notes

Bug Fix for Tablespace Link Checking

Released August 9, 2016

Bug Fixes:

Fix tablespace paths incorrectly identified as $PGDATA subdirectories because their names contained $PGDATA. Also strengthen relative path checks. (Reported by Chris Fort.)

Documentation Features:

Added documentation for scheduling backups with cron. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Improvements:

Moved the backlog from the pgBackRest website to the GitHub repository wiki. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v1.04 Release Notes

Various Bug Fixes

Released July 30, 2016

Bug Fixes:

Fix an unnecessary remote process that could cause threaded backup/restore timeouts or lock conflicts. (Reported by Michael Vitale.)
Require db-path for check. Previously, its absence caused an assertion instead of a useful error message. (Reported by Michael Vitale.)
Fixed check command to throw an error when database version/id does not match that of the archive. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fix a remote starting another remote when the database server’s pgbackrest.conf lacked backup-host. (Reported by Lardière Sébastien.)
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.

Features:

Experimental support for non-exclusive backups in PostgreSQL 9.6 beta3. Later beta changes to control/catalog/WAL versions could break compatibility. pgBackRest updates were planned for each release.

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.

Documentation Features:

Added clarification on why the default for the backrest-user option is backrest. (Suggested by Michael Vitale.)
Updated information about package availability on supported platforms. (Suggested by Michael Vitale.)

v1.03 Release Notes

Check Command and Bug Fixes

Released July 2, 2016

Bug Fixes:

Fix delayed keep-alives when multi-threaded backup processes many small files. They were also completely absent from single/multi-threaded backup resume and restore checksumming. (Reported by Janice Parkinson, Chris Barber.)
Fix manual expire calls failing when db-host was set. Automatic expiration after backup was unaffected. (Reported by Chris Barber.)
Fixed an issue where validation was being running on archive_command even when the archive-check option was disabled.

Features:

Added check command to validate that pgBackRest is configured correctly for archiving and backups. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
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. Later beta changes to control/catalog/WAL versions could break compatibility. pgBackRest updates were planned for each release.

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, commands could use unassigned options. This particularly affected backup-host and db-host, which determine locality.

Documentation Improvements:

Allow a static date to be used for documentation to generate reproducible builds. (Suggested by Adrian Vondendriesch.)
Added documentation for asynchronous archiving to the user guide. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
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.

v1.02 Release Notes

Bug Fix for Perl 5.22

Released June 2, 2016

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. (Fixed by Adrian Vondendriesch. Reviewed by David Steele.)

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Fixed syntax that was not compatible with Perl 5.2X. (Fixed by Christoph Berg, Adrian Vondendriesch. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Fixed absolute paths that were used for the PDF logo. (Reported by Adrian Vondendriesch.)

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. (Contributed by Adrian Vondendriesch, David Steele.)
Convert the change log, formerly the last Markdown-only document, for the standard renderers. Publish it on the website under the name “Releases”. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)

v1.01 Release Notes

Enhanced Info, Selective Restore, and 9.6 Support

Released May 17, 2016

Features:

Enhanced text output of info command to include timestamps, sizes, and the reference list for all backups. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Reviewed by David Steele.)
Allow selective restore of databases from a cluster backup. Restoring selected databases can save substantial space and time. Other databases are inaccessible. Drop them manually to remove them from the shared catalogue. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Greg Smith, Stephen Frost. Suggested by Stephen Frost.)
Experimental support for non-exclusive backups in PostgreSQL 9.6 beta1. Later beta changes to control/catalog/WAL versions could break compatibility. pgBackRest updates were planned for each release. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)

v1.00 Release Notes

New Repository Format and Configuration Scheme, Link Support

Released April 14, 2016

IMPORTANT NOTE: This release broke compatibility with earlier pgBackRest versions. It changed the manifest format, on-disk structure, configuration scheme, and executable/path names. Create a new repository for this version. Keep the old repository temporarily in case you need to restore from it. Older repositories require their original pgBackRest version.

The name changes allow 1.00 and an earlier version to be installed together. See the following notes for details.

Features:

Introduce a simpler configuration scheme. For a simple configuration, place all options in stanza. See the User Guide and Configuration Reference for details. 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. (Suggested by Michael Renner.)
Make repo-path identify the backup and archive repository, whether local or remote. Remove repo-remote-path. 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. (Suggested by Michael Renner, Stephen Frost.)
The default repository name was changed from /var/lib/backup to /var/lib/pgbackrest. (Suggested by Michael Renner, Stephen Frost.)
Lock files are now stored in /tmp/pgbackrest by default. The preferred location, /run/pgbackrest, requires init scripts absent from this release. The lock-path option can be used to configure the lock directory.
Store logs in /var/log/pgbackrest by default. Remove date suffixes so logrotate can manage them. The log-path option can be used to configure the log directory. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)
Executable filename changed from pg_backrest to pgbackrest. (Suggested by Michael Renner, Stephen Frost.)
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.

Pre-Stable Releases

v0.92 Release Notes

Command-line Repository Path Fix

Released April 6, 2016

Bug Fixes:

Fix the master passing --repo-remote-path instead of --repo-path to the remote. This created locks in the default repository directory, /var/lib/backup, and usually failed. This was only an issue when --repo-remote-path was defined on the command line rather than in pg_backrest.conf. (Reported by Jan Wieck.)

v0.91 Release Notes

Tablespace Bug Fix and Minor Enhancements

Released March 22, 2016

IMPORTANT BUG FIX FOR TABLESPACES: Version 0.90 accidentally changed the repository format. Backups with tablespaces were no longer valid PostgreSQL data directories on disk. This affected direct-copy restores, but not restores through the restore command. However, this fix breaks compatibility with older tablespace backups for every restore method. pgBackRest reports an error and refuses to restore them.

Immediately after installing 0.91, take a new full backup of each cluster with tablespaces. To restore an older backup, use the pgBackRest version that created it.

Bug Fixes:

Fixed repository incompatibility introduced in pgBackRest 0.90. (Reported by Evan Benoit.)

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 Suite Features:

Static source analysis using Perl-Critic, currently passes on gentle.

v0.90 Release Notes

9.5 Support, Various Enhancements, and Minor Bug Fixes

Released February 7, 2016

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue where specifying --no-archive-check would throw a configuration error. (Reported by Jason O’Donnell.)
Fixed an issue where a temp WAL file left over after a well-timed system crash could cause the next archive-push to fail.
Allow retention-archive below backup retention (retention-full or retention-diff) without requiring 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.

Features:

For tablespace backup and restore, operate only on the subdirectory for the current PostgreSQL version. Multiple versions can share a tablespace, especially during binary upgrades. This prevents unnecessary backup copies and deletion of other versions during restore. It applies to PostgreSQL >= 9.0; earlier versions could not share tablespace directories.
Generate an error when archive-check=y but archive_command does not execute pg_backrest. (Contributed by Jason O’Donnell. Reviewed by David Steele.)
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 exists, disable --delta and --force. Continue only when $PGDATA and tablespace directories are empty; otherwise, stop the restore.
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.

v0.89 Release Notes

Timeout Bug Fix and Restore Read-Only Repositories

Released December 24, 2015

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue where longer-running backups/restores would timeout when remote and threaded. Use keep-alives so the main process remote does not time out while thread remotes work. The error message for timeouts was also improved to make debugging easier. (Reported by Stephen Frost.)

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.

v0.88 Release Notes

Documentation and Minor Bug Fixes

Released November 22, 2015

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue where the start/stop commands required the --config option. (Reported by Dmitry Didovicher.)
Fixed an issue where log files were being overwritten instead of appended. (Reported by Stephen Frost, Dmitry Didovicher.)
Fixed an issue where backup-user was not optional.

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. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)
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 Release Notes

Website and User Guide

Released October 28, 2015

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. Further documentation was planned. (Contributed by David Steele, Stephen Frost. Reviewed by Michael Renner, Cynthia Shang, Eric Radman, Dmitry Didovicher.)

v0.85 Release Notes

Start/Stop Commands and Minor Bug Fixes

Released October 8, 2015

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.

Features:

Add stop and start to control pgBackRest execution when PostgreSQL is shut down or the system needs inactivity for another reason.
Experimental support for PostgreSQL 9.5 beta1. Future control-version or WAL-magic changes could break support; updates were planned for each pgBackRest release. All regression tests passed except --target-resume, whose behavior changed in 9.5. Tests for .partial WAL segments were not yet available.

v0.82 Release Notes

Refactoring, Command-line Help, and Minor Bug Fixes

Released September 14, 2015

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. (Reported by Stephen Frost.)
Fixed an issue where the PostgreSQL pg_stop_backup() NOTICEs were being output to stderr. (Reported by Stephen Frost.)

Features:

Experimental support for PostgreSQL 9.5 alpha2. Future control-version or WAL-magic changes could break support; updates were planned for each pgBackRest release. All regression tests passed except --target-resume, whose behavior changed in 9.5. Tests for .partial WAL segments were not yet available.

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.

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.

v0.80 Release Notes

DBI Support, Stability, and Convenience Features

Released August 9, 2015

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. (Reported by Michael Renner.)
Fixed protocol issue that was preventing ssh errors (especially on connection) from being logged.

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. (Suggested by Cynthia Shang.)
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.
Check consistency between db-path and db-port. Compare the cluster-reported data_directory with db-path. Also compare the reported version with pg_control. The db-socket-path setting is checked to be sure it is an absolute path.
Experimental support for PostgreSQL 9.5 alpha1. Future control-version or WAL-magic changes could break support; updates were planned for each pgBackRest release. All regression tests passed except --target-resume, whose behavior changed in 9.5. Tests for .partial WAL segments were not yet available.

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.

Test Suite Features:

Added vagrant test configurations for Ubuntu 14.04 and CentOS 7.

v0.78 Release Notes

Remove CPAN Dependencies, Stability Improvements

Released July 13, 2015

Improvements:

Removed dependency on CPAN packages for multi-threaded operation. Updating threads and Thread::Queue can still be useful, but is no longer required.
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 Suite Features:

Added vagrant test configurations for Ubuntu 12.04 and CentOS 6.

v0.77 Release Notes

CentOS/RHEL 6 Support and Protocol Improvements

Released June 30, 2015

Features:

Added file and directory syncs to the File object for additional safety during backup/restore and archiving. (Suggested by Andres Freund.)
Added support for Perl 5.10.1 and OpenSSH 5.3 which are default for CentOS/RHEL 6. (Suggested by Eric Radman.)
Improved error message when backup is run without archive_command set and without --no-archive-check specified. (Suggested by Eric Radman.)

v0.75 Release Notes

New Repository Format, Info Command and Experimental 9.5 Support

Released June 14, 2015

IMPORTANT NOTE: This release broke compatibility with earlier pgBackRest versions. It changed the manifest format, on-disk structure, and binary names. Create a new repository for this version. Keep the old repository temporarily in case you need a restore. The pg_backrest.conf file format did not change.

In cron and elsewhere, replace references to pg_backrest.pl with pg_backrest, without the .pl extension.

Features:

Added the info command.
Logging now uses unbuffered output. This should make log files that are being written by multiple threads less chaotic. (Suggested by Michael Renner.)
Experimental support for PostgreSQL 9.5. This may break when the control version or WAL magic changes but will be updated in each release.

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 Release Notes

Stability Improvements for Archiving, Improved Logging and Help

Released June 1, 2015

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. (Reported by Michael Renner.)
Fix asynchronous archive-push failing to return 0 when archive-max-mb was reached. Move the asynchronous check after transfer to avoid removing the stop file twice. Add unit tests and clearer error messages for this case. (Reported by Michael Renner.)
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. (Reported by Michael Renner.)

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. (Suggested by Michael Renner.)
Better logging before pg_start_backup() to make it clear when the backup is waiting on a checkpoint. (Suggested by Michael Renner.)
Various command behavior and logging fixes. (Reviewed by Michael Renner. Suggested by Michael Renner.)

Improvements:

Replaced JSON module with JSON::PP which ships with core Perl.

Documentation Bug Fixes:

Various help fixes. (Reviewed by Michael Renner. Reported by Michael Renner.)

v0.65 Release Notes

Improved Resume and Restore Logging, Compact Restores

Released May 11, 2015

Bug Fixes:

Fixed an issue where an absolute path was not written into recovery.conf when the restore was run with a relative path.

Features:

Better resume support. Check resumed files for changes. Save the manifest more frequently to retain checksums during backup. 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 Release Notes

Bug Fix for Uncompressed Remote Destination

Released April 21, 2015

Bug Fixes:

Fixed a buffering error that could occur on large, highly-compressible files when copying to an uncompressed remote destination. Decompression detected the error and failed the backup without corrupting it. Successful backups from earlier versions should be unaffected.

v0.60 Release Notes

Better Version Support and WAL Improvements

Released April 19, 2015

Bug Fixes:

Pushing duplicate WAL now generates an error. This worked before only if checksums were disabled.

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.

Test Suite Features:

Regression tests working back to PostgreSQL 8.3.

v0.50 Release Notes

Restore and Much More

Released March 25, 2015

Bug Fixes:

Fixed broken checksums and now they work with normal and resumed backups. Separate checksums from checksum deltas to simplify the implementation. Track checksum deltas in issue #28.
Fixed an issue where a backup could be resumed from an aborted backup that didn’t have the same type and prior backup.

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 exists, --force is required. If Postgres is running, the backup will probably be inconsistent. This option mainly supported unit testing but might also have production uses.
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.

Test Suite Features:

More comprehensive unit tests in all areas.

v0.30 Release Notes

Core Restructuring and Unit Tests

Released October 5, 2014

Documentation Features:

Added much needed documentation

Test Suite Features:

Add broad unit-test coverage for basic operations. Further unit-test work remained necessary.

v0.19 Release Notes

Improved Error Reporting/Handling

Released May 13, 2014

Bug Fixes:

Fix file_copy(), which ignored errors by default. Also fix file_exists(), which sometimes reported an existing file as absent. Together, these bugs could have produced a corrupted backup without errors, although this was very unlikely.

v0.18 Release Notes

Return Soft Error When Archive Missing

Released April 13, 2014

Bug Fixes:

Return 1 from archive-get for a missing archive file. This distinguishes it from hard errors, such as SSH connection or file-copy failures. PostgreSQL can then recognize a normal end of the archive stream. Gaps in that stream are not considered. (Reported by Stephen Frost.)

v0.17 Release Notes

Warn When Archive Directories Cannot Be Deleted

Released April 3, 2014

Bug Fixes:

Report a warning when an archive directory expected to be empty cannot be deleted. Previously, this caused an error. The temporary change allowed processing to continue until a more complete fix was available. Under some conditions, the error prevented the final WAL file from being archived when the first file used a different directory.

v0.16 Release Notes

RequestTTY=yes for SSH Sessions

Released April 1, 2014

Bug Fixes:

Add RequestTTY=yes to SSH sessions in an attempt to prevent intermittent lockups.

v0.15 Release Notes

Added archive-get

Released March 29, 2014

Features:

Added archive-get functionality to aid in restores.
Added option to force a checkpoint when starting the backup, start-fast=y.

v0.11 Release Notes

Minor Fixes

Released March 26, 2014

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. (Reported by Stephen Frost.)
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 Release Notes

Backup and Archiving are Functional

Released March 5, 2014

Features:

This release had no restore command, but backup directories were consistent PostgreSQL data directories. Decompress files or disable backup compression. Uncompressed backups on ZFS or similar filesystems support local snapshot restores for logical backups or targeted data recovery.
Archiving used one thread. It caused no problems on the authors’ multi-terabyte databases with heavy writes. Use a large WAL volume or asynchronous archiving with a large nearby volume.
Backups used multiple threads. Net::OpenSSH appeared not to be 100% thread-safe and very occasionally locked a thread. An overall timeout killed the process to resolve this.
A resumed backup lost checksums. With multiple resumes, only the final backup recorded checksums. Checksums from previous backups remained correct, and a full backup reset everything.
The backup.manifest used Storable because Config::IniFile appeared to handle large files poorly. The authors wanted human-readable text.

Documentation Features:

Documentation existed only in the code and these release notes.