PGCon2015 - final

PGCon 2015
The PostgreSQL Conference

Speakers
David Steele
Schedule
Day Talks - Day 3 - Thursday - 2015-06-18
Room DMS 1140
Start time 11:00
Duration 00:45
Info
ID 822
Event type Lecture
Track DBA
Language used for presentation English

Heavy Duty Backup with PgBackRest

PgBackRest is a backup system developed at Resonate and open sourced to address issues around the backup of databases that measure in tens of terabytes. It supports per file checksums, compression, partial/failed backup resume, high-performance parallel transfer, async archiving, tablespaces, expiration, full/differential/incremental, local/remote operation via SSH, hard-linking, and more. PgBackRest is written in Perl and does not depend on rsync or tar but instead performs its own deltas which gives it maximum flexibility. This talk will introduce the features, give sample configurations, and talk about design philosophy.

PgBackRest aims to be a simple backup and restore system that can seamlessly scale up to the largest databases and workloads.

Instead of relying on traditional backup tools like tar and rsync, PgBackRest implements all backup features internally and features a custom protocol for communicating with remote systems. Removing reliance on tar and rsync allows better solutions to database-specific backup issues. The custom remote protocol limits the types of connections that are required to perform a backup which increases security. Each thread requires only one SSH connection for remote backups.

Primary PgBackRest features:

  • Local or remote backup
  • Multi-threaded backup/restore for performance
  • Checksums
  • Safe backups (checks that logs required for consistency are present before backup completes)
  • Full, differential, and incremental backups
  • Backup rotation (and minimum retention rules with optional separate retention for archive)
  • In-stream compression/decompression
  • Archiving and retrieval of logs for replicas/restores built in
  • Async archiving for very busy systems (including space limits)
  • Backup directories are consistent Postgres clusters (when hardlinks are on and compression is off)
  • Tablespace support
  • Restore delta option
  • Restore using timestamp/size or checksum
  • Restore remapping base/tablespaces