Barman 1.3.3 released

21 August 2014: 2ndQuadrant is proud to announce the release of
version 1.3.3 of Barman, Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL.

This major release improves robustness of both backup procedures and
their monitoring, by introducing:

  * the so-called "smelly backup" control, allowing DBAs to detect
    possible problems in scheduling of periodical backups, by
    receiving complaints by "barman check" when the latest available
    backup for a server is older than a specified timeframe
  * management of retry attempts for base backup copy (for both
    "barman backup" and "barman recover" commands), making the
    operation more resilient to temporary issues such as network
    connection drops

Performance issues have been fixed in relation to remote recovery
over existing directories (incremental recovery), by invoking
checksum control only when strictly necessary.

Usability has been enhanced through better exception handling, output
and logging messages. PostgreSQL 8.3 is also now supported.

The following major bugs have been fixed:

  * Copies "recovery.conf" during remote "barman recover" (#43)
  * Correctly detect pre/post archive hook scripts (#41)

Minor bugs have also been fixed.

Many thanks for funding towards the development of this release go to
Agile Business Group (www.agilebg.com), Jobrapido (www.jobrapido.com),
Navionics (www.navionics.com), and Subito.it (www.subito.it).

For a complete list of changes, see the "Release Notes" section
below.

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/
  * pgespresso extension: https://github.com/2ndquadrant-it/pgespresso

Release notes

  * Added "last_backup_max_age", a new global/server option that
    allows administrators to set the max age of the last backup in a
    catalogue, making it easier to detect any issues with periodical
    backup execution
  * Improved robustness of "barman backup" by introducing two global/
    server options: "basebackup_retry_times" and
    "basebackup_retry_sleep". These options allow an administrator to
    specify, respectively, the number of attempts for a copy
    operation after a failure, and the number of seconds of wait
    before retrying
  * Improved the recovery process via rsync on an existing directory
    (incremental recovery), by splitting the previous rsync call into
    several ones - invoking checksum control only when necessary
  * Added support for PostgreSQL 8.3
  * Minor changes:

      + Support for comma separated list values configuration options
      + Improved backup durability by calling fsync() on backup and
        WAL files during "barman backup" and "barman cron"
      + Improved Nagios output for "barman check --nagios"
      + Display compression ratio for WALs in "barman show-backup"
      + Correctly handled keyboard interruption (CTRL-C) while
        performing barman backup
      + Improved error messages of failures regarding the stop of a
        backup
      + Wider coverage of unit tests
  * Bug fixes:

      + Copies "recovery.conf" on the remote server during "barman
        recover" (#43)
      + Correctly detect pre/post archive hook scripts (#41)

Download

  * Release Notes: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/
  * Sources: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-1.3.3.tar.gz/download
  * RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 5:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-1.3.3-1.rhel5.noarch.rpm/download
    (dependencies: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/rhel5-deps/)
  * RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 6:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-1.3.3-1.rhel6.noarch.rpm/download
    (dependencies: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/rhel6-deps/)
  * PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/barman/1.3.3
  * pgespresso on PostgreSQL Extension framework (PGXN):
http://pgxn.org/dist/pgespresso/
  * pgespresso RPM/Debian packages:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/pgespresso/
  * Online documentation: http://www.pgbarman.org/documentation
  * PDF documentation:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgbarman/files/1.3.3/barman-tutorial.en.pdf/download

Barman (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’s most requested features include backup
catalogues, retention policies, remote backup and recovery, archiving
and compression of WAL files and backups. Barman is distributed under
GNU GPL 3.

--
 Gabriele Bartolini - 2ndQuadrant Italia
 PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
 gabriele.bartolini@2ndQuadrant.it | www.2ndQuadrant.it