pgBackRest, the leading PostgreSQL backup and restore tool, is officially abandoned after 13 years as its solo maintainer lost corporate sponsorship post-Crunchy Data acquisition.
Key Takeaways
The maintainer built pgBackRest over 13 years with Crunchy Data sponsorship; after Crunchy Data was sold, that funding dried up and no replacement sponsor materialized.
pgBackRest v2.58.0 is the final stable release; the repo remains public but no bug fixes, PR reviews, or new features will follow.
The tool supported parallel backup/restore, block-level incremental backups, WAL archiving, S3/Azure/GCS object stores, and encryption – a feature set competitors have not matched.
Any fork must be renamed and must rebuild trust independently, per the maintainer’s explicit notice.
Supabase was the last active sponsor; past sponsors included Crunchy Data and Resonate.
Hacker News Comment Review
Consensus is that WAL-G and Barman are the practical next options, but neither matches pgBackRest’s feature depth – particularly its equal emphasis on restore validation, not just backup creation.
The Crunchy Data M&A thread runs deep: commenters highlight that operators had no visibility into the funding dependency, and critical infrastructure quietly inherited someone else’s acquisition risk.
A minority pushes back on the grief: source is still available, self-maintenance or paid forks are viable, and the open-source compact was honored – the author simply moved on.
Notable Comments
@saadn92: Frames the Crunchy Data sale as the real lesson – “your backup tool’s funding depended on someone else’s M&A strategy and you had no idea.”
@dijit: Notes pgBackRest was unique for treating restore and validation as seriously as taking a backup, pointing to a real-world $1M incident as evidence.
@feike: Suggests the Postgres project itself could absorb pgBackRest into contrib as a path to continuity.
