Barman 1.2.0 released

31 January 2013: Version 1.2.0 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager
for PostgreSQL, has officially been released and is publicly available
for download.
This major release introduces automated support for retention policies
based on redundancy of periodical backups or recovery window.
Retention policies are integrated by a safety mechanism that allows
administrators to specify a minimum number of periodical backups that
must exist at any time for a server.
For a complete list of changes, see the “Release Notes” section below.

Backup retention policies:
A backup retention policy is an user-defined policy that determines how
long backups and related archive logs (Write Ahead Log segments in
PostgreSQL) need to be retained for recovery procedures. Through the
‘retention_policy’ configuration option, Barman retains the periodical
backups required to satisfy the current retention policy, and any
archived WAL files required for the complete recovery of those backups.
Barman users can define a retention policy in terms of backup redundancy
(how many periodical backups, e.g. 5) or a recovery window (how long,
e.g. 3 months).

Minimum redundancy safety:
Through the ‘minimum_redundancy’ configuration option, Barman controls
the minimum number of backups available at any time in the catalogue for
a specific server. This feature will protect users from accidental
delete operations.

Links:
* Website: http://www.pgbarman.org/
* Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/
* Documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation/
* Support: http://www.pgbarman.org/support/

Sponsors:
The open-source development of retention policies under GPL has been
sponsored by a large European company that opted to remain anonymous.

Release Notes:
* Added the “retention_policy_mode” global/server option which defines
the method for enforcing retention policies (currently only “auto”)
* Added the “minimum_redundancy” global/server option which defines the
minimum number of backups to be kept for a server
* Added the “retention_policy” global/server option which defines
retention policies management based on redunancy (e.g. REDUNDANCY 4) or
recovery window (e.g. RECOVERY WINDOW OF 3 MONTHS)
* Added retention policy support to the logging infrastructure, the
“check” and the “status” commands
* The “check” command now integrates minimum redundancy control
* Added retention policy states (valid, obsolete and potentially
obsolete) to “show-backup” and “list-backup” commands
* The ‘all’ keyword is now forbidden as server name
* Added basic support for Nagios plugin output to the ‘check’ command
through the –nagios option
* Barman now requires argh => 0.21.2 and argcomplete
* Minor bug fixes

About Barman:
Barman (acronym for Backup And Recovery MANager) is an open-source
administration tool for disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers written
in Python. It allows your organisation to perform remote backups of
multiple servers in business critical environments and help DBAs during
the recovery phase. Barman most wanted features include backup
catalogues, retention policies, remote recovery, archiving and
compression of WAL files and backups. Built on top of PostgreSQL's
robust and reliable Point-In-Time-Recovery technology, Barman allows
database administrators to manage the backup and recovery phases of
several PostgreSQL database servers from a centralised location, using
an intuitive command interface. Barman is distributed under GNU GPL 3.