Sorry to hear this. Well done for maintaining a successful project for so long.
timwis•Apr 27, 2026
Really sad to see this. I had only recently learnt about this project, and was really impressed by it. I was planning to set it up this weekend (via autobase). I've also been under the impression that it's likely to be what powers the backups in RDS, Cloud SQL, etc., but I may have misunderstood.
oulipo2•Apr 27, 2026
Waiting for all the C-level execs saying that "anyway this is not needed, we're going to vibe-code a solution to our production database backups" lol
absynth•Apr 27, 2026
The backups will then be hyper-optimized from three hours down to 5 minutes using devnull compression technologies. Its super effective!
duskdozer•Apr 27, 2026
Why even waste all this time and money on backups in the first place? Just don't make mistakes.
theandrewbailey•Apr 27, 2026
Only for their AI to delete the production database and all the backups, and be forced to write an apology.
The A.I will probably steal the code and make it an unmaintainable mess that deletes backups when someone tries to restore
evertheylen•Apr 27, 2026
Ah, sad to read this. Does anyone know of good alternatives?
DeathArrow•Apr 27, 2026
Postgres has built-in backups starting with version 18.
evertheylen•Apr 27, 2026
From what I can find Postgres 17 [1] introduced incremental backups to pg_basebackup, refined in 18, but nowhere near the full featureset of pgBackRest. Is that what you meant? Having builtin incremental replication to a S3-compatible storage would be great.
Why not try to find a successor instead of archiving the repo and forbidding the use of the name? I'm sure with a 3.8k stars repo you'll find competent people willing to continue the work.
c0balt•Apr 27, 2026
It is reasonable to ask for a follow-up project/fork to take a different name. Naming your project, e. G., pgbackrest-ng, does not sound too onerous of a requirement and clearly communicates to users that maintainers have changed (see also paperless ng/ngx as good examples of such a change).
Finding a successor is also not easy nor cheap (in regards to time).
xnorswap•Apr 27, 2026
You'll also find plenty of potential malware injectors too, and who would want the responsibility of trying to vet a successor and have to work out the difference?
jeswin•Apr 27, 2026
There's no way to know if a new maintainer will live up to whatever standards they've kept to date. Archiving should be the default decision, unless there's formal and elaborate handover.
dschuessler•Apr 27, 2026
Because you will attract people who will want to take advantage of the trust these 3.8k stars signal to some people, for example, by means of supply chain attacks.
leoc•Apr 27, 2026
The Apache Foundation used to help with this sort of governance problem didn't it? Thugh maybe pgbackrest isn't quite big and official enough to be the kind of software which Apache takes on, and one certainly hears (increasing?) grumbles about Apache's stewardship.
hombre_fatal•Apr 27, 2026
Because that rug pulls your users.
3.8k stars and the name is years of built up trust with you, not with the person you gave it to.
duskdozer•Apr 27, 2026
Those people can just as easily fork it and make a new name then. Otherwise you end up with situations where it's actually an entirely new thing under new developers under the same name. Even riskier in the age of the "AI clean rewrite"
bayindirh•Apr 27, 2026
Sometimes you want to hang things to your wall, and be done with it.
I'd personally do the same. I wouldn't want to be bothered by the future maintainers' choices and get feedback/flak for it. It's a well-known and well-respected way to cycle the name with a "-ng" or "-nx" prefix to signal that this is the newer project with a different set of maintainers.
Being MIT, while is not my favorite license, doesn't give free license to grab and run with things.
Honestly, in my eyes, 3.8K or 38K stars mean nothing, because Open Source is not about you [0], to begin with.
A maintainer that is mainly motivated by the 3.8k stars aspect is probably not the person you want. Working on critical OSS software is fun until it's not, especially when you are not paid for that work.
moritzruth•Apr 27, 2026
They are not really forbidding the use of the name (unless they have registered a trademark), they probably simply want to avoid confusion.
AndyNemmity•Apr 27, 2026
Why is it the responsibility of the person working for free?
Why is it never the responsibility of the people using it?
If anyone cares enough they will. People didn’t care enough to pay, so maybe no one cares enough to fork and be the new unpaid custodian
colesantiago•Apr 27, 2026
> Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the project viable.
So this was the problem, I thought Snowflake would pick up the sponsorship of this project but since it is a competing database it doesn't really make much sense.
I really wish many critical OSS projects get the sponsorship they need to continue.
Otherwise the software industry is in real trouble.
Forking it just passes the buck onto another maintainer with the same problem, this time without the original creator maintaining it.
wg0•Apr 27, 2026
Very simple. Name it to pgbackrest-AI and add the line:
"AI driven backups with smartest world class models optimizing every byte stored via deep AI analysis."
With that added, a million dollars is just chimp change. YC alone would be adding them to all the seasons multiple times over summer, winter and monsoon etc.
I doubt that they have sponsored an OSS project or made it sustainable.
nijave•Apr 27, 2026
Postgres doesn't compete with Snowflake. Snowflake recently announced a Postgres DBaaS offering that integrates with Snowflake (actually has competitive pricing with AWS RDS Postgres)
They're two non competing verticals. It's a shame Snowflake decided to shrink Crunchy Data's community presence.
fabian2k•Apr 27, 2026
I was about to set up Postgres backups with pgbackrest very soon. It looked like the most mature solution for my use case. What I was aiming for was continuous backups to an object storage provider, without a central DB server but the backup tool directly installed on the Postgres server.
I'll have to look at the alternatives again, I think that was mostly WAL-G and Barman. It looks like Barman doesn't support direct backup to object storage, unfortunately. And I find the WAL-G documentation very confusing. What I'm looking for is WAL streaming and object storage support, to minimize the amount of data that can be lost and so I don't have to run my own backup server.
drcongo•Apr 27, 2026
This is exactly what I was setting it up to do this morning. My research came down to this and WAL-G for the same reasons, and I picked pgBackRest over WAL-G because the documentation was clearer.
bobkb•Apr 27, 2026
So sad. We have been using this amazing project extensively
This project looks nice, albeit a bit young for a backup tool.
Did you encounter any issues or limitations?
arend321•Apr 27, 2026
I'm also using this project. Easy to configure and operate.
I am feeling a slight unease using such a recent project for things as important as the database. But the polished interface combined with the easy docker deployment made me use it anyway. Restores need some permission tuning on PostgreSQL but otherwise happy.
They are very proud of their github star acquisition curve [0], the "blessing" by Anthropic [1]
We've been happy with WAL-E and now WAL-G (successor). The streaming PITR nature of these won over pgbackrest when we did the analysis ~9 years ago.
fabian2k•Apr 27, 2026
Are you using WAL archiving? As far as I understand, pgbackrest and Barman can also use direct streaming from the DB (same mechanism as replication), I didn't find any mention of this in the WAL-G documentation.
With WAL archiving you need to wait for a WAL segment to finish before it's backed up. With streaming backups the deadtime is minimized. At least that's as far as I understand this, I didn't get to try this out in practice yet.
andruby•Apr 27, 2026
WAL-G's PITR backups are insurance against data loss through erroneous data manipulations (eg: accidental DELETE/DROP/UPDATE). WAL-G's streaming approach (using pg_receivewal or similar) sends WAL records to backup storage continuously as they're generated, rather than waiting for a full segment to complete.
On top of that, for availability (and minimizing deadtime), we have 2 replicas using streaming replication. If the lead PG crashes, one of the replicas is promoted to lead (and starts accepting writes), and we "only" lose the writes that haven't been sent over the streaming replication.
You can fully eliminate that window of data loss with synchronous replication (vs the default asynchronous replication - which we use). The write slowdown (replica network round trip + 2nd write at replica) isn't worth it for us
zie•Apr 27, 2026
I dunno how they compare, but we have been using barman for a long time very happily. We test our backups every night, by restoring from barman into a _nightly DB. which we then give out to users as a training/testing spot, so that we know when it breaks. It hasn't broken in many years now. <3
freakynit•Apr 27, 2026
So sad to see this happening..
I had just last year prepared a detailed guide for reliable postgre backups to local volume as well as cloud storage, using pgBackRest, for my own projects.. pgBackRest have worked so well for me
Thanks to the author for all the time and effort he put into this project..
2ndorderthought•Apr 27, 2026
I really wish projects like this didn't fall through the cracks and continued to be funded. The struggles of OSS are too real.
freakynit•Apr 27, 2026
True.. I truly wish wish we had better open-source license and more open-source projects adopt it..
Tiered pricing license... tiering based upon annual company revenues... should start super low for small companies (free for individuals), and jump to thousands of dollars per year for 10+ milion revenue companies.
I understand that this might not fully be in the spirit of open-source, but, what's happening currently is way worse.. where giant companies rip off the hardwork of open-source software maintainers without compsensating them adequately.
topham•Apr 27, 2026
Sigh. Bane of my existence is any service which does this.
My org theoretically makes hundreds of millions, unfortunately none of that money is ours. So I get forced into a procurement process for anything that costs more than (ridiculously small limit), and get stuck using the worst in class because it's cheaper.
duskdozer•Apr 27, 2026
May be inconvenient to you, but the point of licenses like that is that inconvenience to companies that aren't willing to pay for the work.
2ndorderthought•Apr 27, 2026
It would be great if github or someone did something to support licenses like this. So procurement was more like a cloud spend. Companies could put caps on the monthly spend for the projects they use. Organizations should be used to paying for products from individuals just like how they do from megacorporations.
jumpconc•Apr 27, 2026
Sounds like whoever is getting that money is hamstringing your organization on purpose so they can keep more of your money.
8organicbits•Apr 27, 2026
Is there a measurement that would work better for your organizations setup?
spockz•Apr 27, 2026
If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit. A license expressed in terms of profit instead of revenue would be suitable for you.
I thought a while back there were some products that had dual licenses, a fairly open license for private use, use in small companies, but requiring purchase and/or contribution back when used in something like a cloud providers SaaS.
I like open source, but I also can understand the nagging feeling when your (and your contributors work) is used for pure corporate greed.
hoistbypetard•Apr 27, 2026
> If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit. A license expressed in terms of profit instead of revenue would be suitable for you.
I like this idea, but the devil is in the details. "profit" is less defined than revenue. You have to specify your accounting principles. What counts as an expense that deducts from revenue to help define profit?
It's not impossible, but there's a lot more variance depending on locality, business structure, etc. than there is with just "revenue".
Of course, I suspect it all comes down to whether the entity offering the license is large enough and well-enough legally armed to force an audit of the organization taking the license. If they're not able to do that, it's all self-reporting anyway.
vladvasiliu•Apr 27, 2026
And even if everything is "legit", plenty of corporations make close to no profit because they're "licensing" or paying whatever other fees to a different company that magically happen to track whatever cash they have on hand at the end of the year.
See all these multinationals paying close to no taxes in the countries where they operate.
Chris2048•Apr 27, 2026
> If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit
Maybe they mean their org makes a lot of money the money for their parent corp, but little of that ( goes into / is reflected in ) their own orgs budget?
lelanthran•Apr 27, 2026
> Tiered pricing license... tiering based upon annual company revenues... should start super low for small companies (free for individuals), and jump to thousands of dollars per year for 10+ milion revenue companies.
Too complicated. Make it GPL (not MIT) and offer dual licensing.
Those corps that need it but are GPL-phobic can have a different license, and can pay for it.
didgetmaster•Apr 27, 2026
The project is being abandoned because the maintainer is tired of working for free. They said that they hoped someone would fork it, change the name, and pick up where it was left off.
Why would anyone do that? If the person who was most passionate about it for over a dozen years has given up because it was never worth the trouble; what fool would think things will be different going forward?
This is the curse of OSS.
tclancy•Apr 27, 2026
While I tend to agree with the line of thinking in this thread that the ethos of open source (and the web writ large) have been taken advantage of by capitalism, I can't quite see this: things belong to a time and place in one's life. The creator feels like his time with this project is at an end, but why would that be an impediment to someone who needs a package like this stepping up and maintaining it? Better to do that than build a replacement from scratch (most likely). And more likely to attract new sponsorship by being a reliable steward of a known name (albeit with a suffix or something).
gjsman-1000•Apr 27, 2026
> have been taken advantage of by capitalism
“And many programmers, they say to me, “The people who hire programmers demand this, this and this. If I don't do those things, I'll starve.” It's literally the word they use. Well, you know, as a waiter, you're not going to starve. So, really, they're in no danger.”
- Richard Stallman in 2001 admitting his ideology can’t explain how a programmer can eat
In my opinion, though this is HN heresy, the free software ideology and ethos was naïve, utopian, and clueless about how power works, from day 1. His dream is literally structurally impossible, capitalism or no capitalism, so long as humans need money to eat.
pdimitar•Apr 27, 2026
What is RMS quote supposed to prove here? We can always find new work? Is that it? If so -- not so fast. When you have a family, your freedom is severely hampered. Most companies understand this and abuse it.
And yes the free software ideology is as naive as a puppy. Every serious individual understands this. Most HN-ers are in a fairly specific bubble (income brackets, geo-location, political leanings, upbringing, the whole package); of course to them this is "heresy". This is well-understood. Happily for me and many others around here, karma farming is not the goal so we don't mind getting some gray arrow treatment every now and then.
WickedSmoke•Apr 27, 2026
Communism occurs in part whenever a need is met or an economic decision is made without using value tokens. Direct access to resources without money happens every day (e.g. anyone using Linux rather than a proprietary OS, or exercising in a public park rather than a for-profit gym). The only thing keeping other products & services hoarded behind paywalls is devotion to capitalist ideology. It literally is a problem of capitalism. The structure of the world outside of people's brains has nothing to do with it.
shevy-java•Apr 27, 2026
> what fool would think things will be different going forward?
> This is the curse of OSS.
There are examples of failing forks. And there are examples of forks that became better than the original. It is not possible to generalize this into one or the other solely via a curse-of-OSS conclusion. Funding will always be an issue; but funding is not necessarily the main or only criterium as to whether a project fails or succeeds.
cortesoft•Apr 27, 2026
An alternative reading is that after 13 years dedicated to a single project, the original author is simply burnt out on it, but a new maintainer can start with fresh passion that will last a number of years.
Just because someone gets tired of working on something eventually doesn't mean everyone else will immediately feel the same way.
jumpconc•Apr 27, 2026
The struggles of living in an economic system while completely rejecting that system and pretending it isn't there.
AndyNemmity•Apr 27, 2026
There is no evidence of any of that.
He was paid to work on it. That stopped, he continued to work on it in the hopes he could find someone who would hire him to work on it.
That wasn’t true, no one has funded it.
So due to the economic system he no longer maintains it.
That’s your economic system at work. No one is pretending it isn’t there, this is the outcome of it
faangguyindia•Apr 27, 2026
One thing people are not taking into account is that many developers now have less time and are working a lot more because AI makes it seem it should be possible to hit those deadlines, etc.
Also, many programers have spent their entire funds on tokens, so neither are left with extra money nor time.
DeathArrow•Apr 27, 2026
I have recently configured pgbackrest for our app. :(
joshmn•Apr 27, 2026
I have a moderately sized 2TB production database I have enjoyed using pgBackRest on, and was—this week—going to set it up on another 8TB database we have.
What's the next-closest thing? wal-g? barman? databasus? I only get to cosplay as a DBA.
drcongo•Apr 27, 2026
I can beat you on the timing - I'd never used pgBackRest before, but started setting it up on a project about 2 hours ago, by the time I'd finished the README had been updated.
hosteur•Apr 27, 2026
databasus does not do PITR.
zigzag312•Apr 27, 2026
Is that info up-to-date? Their readme states:
**Backup types**
- **Logical** — Native dump of the database in its engine-specific binary format. Compressed and streamed directly to storage with no intermediate files
- **Physical** — File-level copy of the entire database cluster. Faster backup and restore for large datasets compared to logical dumps
- **Incremental** — Physical base backup combined with continuous WAL segment archiving. **Enables Point-in-time recovery (PITR)** — restore to any second between backups. Designed for disaster recovery and near-zero data loss requirements
EDIT: It seem PITR has been added this March (for PostgreSQL)
Mentioned this on X but CockroachDB should sponsor this - their audience is Postgres people and open source contributions can be great marketing.
pjmlp•Apr 27, 2026
Plenty of comments of "So sad I have been using this".
How many actually contributed back to keep it going?
LetMeLogin•Apr 27, 2026
I am not sure why are you gatekeeping this? People can't comment now that they are sad because of what happened?
pjmlp•Apr 27, 2026
Gatekeeping?!?
Those that paid, or did any kind of contributions upstream are entitled to be sad.
Others should consider this is what happens to that lego piece in Nebraska, when no one contributes, and everyone uses it.
piva00•Apr 27, 2026
That is exactly gatekeeping, no? You are only entitled to feel sad if you contributed effort or financially, otherwise you aren't allowed to feel.
Why can't others that just used the tool feel sad? It is supposed to be used, it's the whole reason for it to exist; not everyone using it will have technical expertise or money to contribute to it, feeling sad about it when it solved issues for someone is a completely normal response.
AndyNemmity•Apr 27, 2026
The reason for something to exist is not to be used. He was paid while doing it, and that pay stopped, and he kept doing it. Now he wishes to stop.
The reason for something to exist is someone finds joy doing it. Especially when they are unpaid.
The sadness should be focused on his inability to support himself with a tool that clearly a lot of companies, and people are using and gaining value for.
piva00•Apr 27, 2026
The reason for a tool to exist is to be used, even if it's just by a singular person, other projects that aren't tools do definitely fit into the criteria "just for the joy of it" but a tool, by definition, has at least one usage, and building a tool gives someone joy from the tool being useful.
The sadness doesn't need to be focused anywhere, you can feel sad for more than one thing at a time. People can be sad that a tool they think is great, have relied on, and has been important for their use case is going away while also be sad that such a great tool doesn't get enough support from companies. Both can be true, no need to control what people can or should feel.
electroly•Apr 27, 2026
They're right. This is over the top. Your initial post in this thread was sensible (telling the users of Pgbackrest that they should have supported it if they didn't want this to happen, and saying nothing about what emotions are valid to have), but you took it much further here. People should financially support the OSS projects they use, and the lack of such support is why this project is no longer maintained, but claiming people aren't allowed to feel anything about it is just playing a game that isn't helping the cause. We all know this problem, and being sad while having not supported the project isn't a statement that we disagree that the problem exists. It's a big stretch to assume that it is.
I've never heard of this project before and I still think it's a bummer that a tool people liked and that the maintainer cared about was unable to find backing. I was never going to support it; I just heard of it for the first time today and I don't use it! I'm still sad. We're not robots here. We're fellow developers, and we know it's tough out there.
Aurornis•Apr 27, 2026
> Those that paid, or did any kind of contributions upstream are entitled to be sad.
I didn’t even use pgbackrest but I’m still sad to see this.
I should have checked the comments first to determine my eligibility to be sad about this issue, before I had feelings that upset the sadness gatekeepers.
jmull•Apr 27, 2026
I’d think the lesson here is obvious, but maybe not.
If you thought this project had value, you could’ve contributed to it. You probably still could.
Or, if you think its value is worth $0 (to you), maybe it’s not really that sad (to you).
People are expressing sadness as if there was nothing to be done about it, but, of course, there’s a really straight-forward thing that could’ve been done about it (possibly still could).
FartyMcFarter•Apr 27, 2026
The number of maintainers is always smaller than the number of users for any successful project. GitHub displays the number of contributors as 57, I don't know if that's small or not.
victorbjorklund•Apr 27, 2026
It's such a strawman to claim that you cannot be sad if something disappears where you have not financially or you work contributed. Someone can say that they are sad that the Notre Dame burned down even if they haven't personally contributed to Notre Dame.
jhardcastle•Apr 27, 2026
That comparison is fallacious too, I think.
Something burning down is a tragedy, beyond anyone's control. It's also possible to love something for its beauty, and be sad that a globally historic monument suffered such an act of god that the irreplaceable art and craftsmanship is gone forever.
Something closing down, perhaps because there was not enough money to sustain its continued operation, when tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people were using it? That's a perfectly appropriate time to remind folks, "if you like free software, consider donating to help sustain the almost full-time effort it takes to keep packages like this alive."
Op said, "this is sad [because] I've been using this," and the implication is, "I want to keep using this but now I can't because it's gone" and making the connection that "one way to prevent this from happening to other packages you like is to contribute financially."
victorbjorklund•Apr 27, 2026
Alright, take a park closing then. Can you be sad about that if you haven't personally raised money to finance the park?
esafak•Apr 27, 2026
Yes, I can't finance every park. I can feel sad about people suffering throughout the world without personally supporting them all.
I am an active open source contributor.
SoftTalker•Apr 27, 2026
I pay taxes. I pay for every park in my city. I pay for state and national parks too. I rarely/never use them. I have no choice. That makes me sad. I wish I could direct where my personal tax dollars were spent, but that kind of defeats the point of taxes, which are to fund the things that nobody wants to pay for (or are impractical to pay for, individually).
jamespo•Apr 27, 2026
Ah the "I would pay for firefox but" fallacy
AndyNemmity•Apr 27, 2026
Well said, accurate framing.
ordu•Apr 27, 2026
If I didn't use Pgbackrest and never contributed to it, am I entitled to feel sadness?
Quothling•Apr 27, 2026
How often are the consumers and users of tools like this also in positions to contribute financially? It's silly, but I can spin up $10000 worth of azure resources and nobody would mind (as long as they actally had a purpose etc). In contrast I doubt I'd ever get a decisionmaker to sign off on supporting an OSS project with even $50, even if we have tech that depends on it.
kreco•Apr 27, 2026
This is such hackernews comment.
Not everything is about money.
I can use Pgbackrest in my side project which does not generate any money. Maybe my side project is another open source project where no one give me money, but I'm still contributing to the open source ecosystem, maybe I reported bugs which help everyone.
There are so may details and possible reasons to not give money and use open source software, but your negative and naive comment totally miss them.
hakube•Apr 27, 2026
People can't be sad now?
iconicBark•Apr 27, 2026
I use pgbackrest for some databases in production, and it has been VERY good.
feike•Apr 27, 2026
pgbackrest is the most versatile piece of backup technology for PostgreSQL and in my experience the other products do not come close.
I am therefore quite sad to see this happen. It won't be easy to get feature parity with this great product.
I sincerely hope this is a reversible decision, or perhaps the postgres project could even absorb it into contrib.
j1elo•Apr 27, 2026
Open Source has worked fine here. The author doesn't find financial support for the work, so they just want to change winds and that's a perfectly fine path forward.
If this is really much more than a personal project "for fun, on my leisure time", and it became an actually serious product-level project that provides good value in commercial environments for people, there's clearly an opportunity for a for-profit company to step in and cover that niche. But that'd require that users became customers and actually departed from their money to pay for it :)
I guess most will switch instead to asking who's the next project maintainer to work on it, to whom the new bug reports and complaints can continue to be sent for free. But if there's money to be made by using a tool, there should be money paid for using it too. We "just" need to find the new generation of FOSS Financial Sustainability solutions that actually work! Donations don't make the cut.
spockz•Apr 27, 2026
I wonder whether the author has considered taking the product to a paid level and what would be necessary for it.
Obviously, all contributors have some form of copyright, which may or may not have been waived depending on whether there was an ACL in place and jurisdiction. So he would need to get permission from the copyright holders, maybe in exchange for a percentage of the profit.
pasc1878•Apr 27, 2026
ANd that gets rather looked on here as the authors being deceitful and not really Open Source doing a bait and switch.
tracker1•Apr 27, 2026
I've been working on a software package I'm hoping to release in a few months... I'm really torn on either split FLOSS with commercial extensions, or just going fully private... I was planning on a pretty generous free tier, but hoping to make a bit on the side from commercial customers.
It's a bit of a niche as it is, so that's going to be rough in any kind of pricing model, as a large part of that niche is either homebrew types and the other commercial industry that will likely require some more integrations and customization.
j1elo•Apr 27, 2026
Changing the license of already existing code? You might not be able to do that without permission from other contributors, I agree.
But it's MIT license. We can open a company tomorrow, take that code, and start selling it. Further development and improvements of the code could be trivially done openly or behind closed doors. FWIW the author themselves could do that if they wanted.
hosh•Apr 27, 2026
Something I learned about being a part of an ecosystem: if you want it, you need to support it and help it stay alive.
That applies to local shops as it does open source projects.
freedomben•Apr 27, 2026
> TL;DR: pgBackRest is no longer being maintained. If you fork pgBackRest, please select a new name for your project.
> I imagine at some point pgBackRest will be forked, but that will be a new project with new maintainers, and they will need to build trust the same way we did.
I completely understand having to back out of maintenance on an OSS project, but why also slam the door closed on someone taking over? There may be someone very qualified willing to step up, and that could give your existing users continuity.
This feels analgous to deciding to stop maintaining a community garden, but rather than let your neighbor step up, you decide to salt the ground so it can never grow there again, telling your neighbors "you can pull up my plants and move them, but you can't use all the ground and roots that are already there." It just feels bitter.
Latty•Apr 27, 2026
To me it reads as being worried that someone malicious could step in and use the project's name to do harm. If you don't have someone within the project with trust built ready-to-go, establishing that trust enough to hand over the project is a big task.
freedomben•Apr 27, 2026
I totally agree, that is a huge risk. But what if someone from the postgres team decided to step up and maintain it? I'm not saying that's likely, but it is possible for a very popular tool like this. With the way the project exited now, that would not at all be an option. Obviously if postgres themselves decided to do it, they wouldn't need the previous credibility so this isn't the best example
leoc•Apr 27, 2026
The Apache Foundation used to step in in this kind of situation, didn't it? Thugh maybe pgbackrest isn't quite big and official enough to be the kind of software which Apache takes on, and one certainly hears (increasing?) grumbles about Apache's stewardship.
_flux•Apr 27, 2026
If someone really wants to continue the name, they can of course ask the author; maybe they have a compelling case.
AndyNemmity•Apr 27, 2026
It can still be forked. There is no salting the ground here. If you maintain the project and have for a long time, and you wish to stop, you can stop.
If no one cared enough to support the project, why does anyone care enough now? It all sounds hollow. Nothing bitter about it.
When you work on a project, any project, you have a responsibility. At some point we all can stop, and become free to not have that responsibility.
rolfvandekrol•Apr 27, 2026
From the story told in the README it is clear this is a project ran by a single person. There is no wider maintenance team that can be trusted with continuing the project. So anyone who offers to take up the maintenance will be unknown to the current maintainer and cannot automatically be trusted.
The alternative to this seemingly bitter approach is handing over the trust they built to some unknown person who can do whatever they want with the data in a lot of PostgreSQL databases around the world. I think I prefer the bitterness here over blind trust.
freedomben•Apr 27, 2026
Sure, but what if someone from the postgres team decided they wanted to step up? The door is completely shut for that now. And if we can't trust someone from the postgres team to do it, then who can we trust?
remus•Apr 27, 2026
I think this is overly harsh. After the guy has been working on the project for such a long period a handover would inevitably be a long process, not least to ensure whoever took over didn't abuse the existing user-base. Completely fair if the existing maintainer doesn't want to take on this work, and arguably a fork forces consumers to properly consider that someone else is in charge now.
i wish the guy could have made a paid version so he could have continued it. Unfortunately, most people do not want to financially contribute to open source and especially when that open source project becomes a paid product.
alex_suzuki•Apr 27, 2026
adding to that, lots of devs don’t want the hassle of running a software business
dzonga•Apr 27, 2026
props to the author for such fine work.
hopefully some of the big co's step up & pay a retainer to keep the author going.
bdcravens•Apr 27, 2026
"so sad to see this"
The source is still available. Maintaining your own copy and/or paying someone to do it is an option.
While you're at it, look at all the projects you depend on that you would similarly be sad about losing, and set up those donations today.
thinkingtoilet•Apr 27, 2026
This is the right attitude. All the "this is sad" comments make me want to ask, "How sad are you? Sad enough to donate?"
spockz•Apr 27, 2026
For me the sad part about the story is that someone who clearly knows what they are doing wasn’t able to find a job that would have permitted him to continue working on the project and that there were insufficient sponsors from companies.
Not the fact that he made the decision he made.
radimm•Apr 27, 2026
This is the message the author posted on LinkedIn:
After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship for much of this time, but there were also many late nights and weekends as I worked to make pgBackRest the project it is today, aided by numerous contributors. Every open-source developer knows exactly what I mean and how much of your life gets devoted to a special project.
Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the project viable.
Like everyone else, I need to make a living, and the range of pgBackRest-related roles is very limited. I can now consider a wider variety of opportunities, but those will not leave me time to work on pgBackRest, which requires a fair amount of time for maintenance, bug fixes, PR reviews, answering issues, etc. That does not even include time to write new features, which is what I really love to do. Rather than do the work poorly and/or sporadically, I think it makes more sense to have a hard stop.
I will post a notice of obsolescence and archive the repository. I imagine at some point pgBackRest will be forked, but that will be a new project with new maintainers, and they will need to build trust the same way we did.
Again, many thanks to all the pgBackRest contributors over the years. It was a pleasure working with you!
Vordimous•Apr 27, 2026
Thank you for adding this here.
aetherspawn•Apr 27, 2026
It still works, you can just keep using it.
I think that’s what the author would want. People to keep using it until it doesn’t work anymore.
spockz•Apr 27, 2026
And hopefully someone wants to stand up then. Not sure whether it needs to be a fork or that they can join as contributor on the repo.
steveharing1•Apr 27, 2026
I won't say He should be working on it no matter what but I believe its a very good project and I think as always community forks will be the only option when it won't work in future
do not yell at me, but... this is where genAI may be useful.
what if, bare with me, what if, after a certain amount of time, a certain amount of "requests", a code library can be given to a genAI to maintain; no improvements, no extra features, just bug fixes? This could continue until either someone picks it up, or the open source solution becomes irrelevant, not enough "requests".
Yes, lots of details to work out.
maherbeg•Apr 27, 2026
pgbackrest is awesome, truly. Thank you so much for the work you've put into this project over the years, and I'm sad the crunchy data acquisition couldn't keep the project alive.
dcchambers•Apr 27, 2026
We're going to see a lot of this over the next 1-2 years.
Software Engineers suddenly feel like they're fighting for their lives for employment, and time won't be "wasted" maintaining OSS for free.
We all need to eat.
dotBen•Apr 27, 2026
It's funny how developer time is considered free, but tokens are not.
In other words when it comes to FOSS contribution, developer time can be donated but tokens can't - so as we move into agentic code era all FOSS development carries a cost unless it is purely done by hand (which more often it isn't).
Not saying this is what is going on here but it's presumably a factor if the author was looking for an employer to sponsor development with his labor (and tokens).
Aeolun•Apr 27, 2026
I don’t understand this? I donate plenty of tokens towards OSS.
I guess it’s anthropic donating the tokens because they give me about $5k of API tokens for the $200 I pay them.
afgrant•Apr 27, 2026
Does Postgres no have online backup built in? All of the other major DBMSes do.
all of these various 3rd party backup tools use these things. Mostly it's QOL stuff that you get from a 3rd party tool. We use barman, very happily: https://pgbarman.org/
nijave•Apr 27, 2026
Hopefully barman has some longevity being under EDB assuming some hyperscaler doesn't gobble them up
nijave•Apr 27, 2026
Postgres is very "unix-y" in that everything is a separate tool. It has backup interfaces and commands but doesn't ship with a comprehensive backup management solution.
immanuwell•Apr 27, 2026
thirteen years of blood, sweat, and late nights shipped into the void - respect to David Steele for keeping it real and pulling the plug clean rather than letting it rot in maintenance burden
Aeolun•Apr 27, 2026
Is it really that much effort to maintain something? I’ll admit I haven’t the foggiest, my most maintained thing having like 200 stars or something, but if I leave it alone for half a year it doesn’t suddenly combust into flame.
hombre_fatal•Apr 27, 2026
Motte: if you stop maintaining a project, it won’t become unusable in six months.
Bailey: maintaining a popular project is not that much work.
What?
imrozim•Apr 27, 2026
This is scary as a solo dev who builts on postgresql. You pick a tool trust it, build around it, one day it stops. Oss sustainability is a real problem
3form•Apr 27, 2026
I would say "unpaid tool use" is a real problem. Or perhaps "contractless" is actually touching the core issue?
mmaunder•Apr 27, 2026
Metrics would help others who may want to rescue the project consider the options. Eg user base would make it clear if there’s an immediate opportunity to work with the author to launch a paid backup service around the project, funding continued work on it.
SupLockDef•Apr 27, 2026
Another one bites the dust...
Is it me ore I am seeing more and more projects being unmaintained due to financial and/or mental fatigue?
The Crunchy Data part is what people should pay more attention to here. He had corporate sponsorship and it was working. Company got acquired, new owners didn't prioritize the same things, and now 3.8k-star critical infrastructure goes dark. Your backup tool's funding depended on someone else's M&A strategy and you had no idea.
I've been gradually moving my own stuff to SQLite and git-tracked files partly because of this. Every managed Postgres setup has a dependency tree of tools maintained by people whose funding situation you know nothing about.
elAhmo•Apr 27, 2026
It didn't go dark, and doesn't seem that critical in general.
General idea still stands, but it is not like this just disappeared and backups will stop working.
rowanG077•Apr 27, 2026
Why does sqlite not suffer from the same risk?
borplk•Apr 27, 2026
I find it shocking (not really) that among the many BILLION dollar companies built on the back of Postgres there isn't enough sense to pay the salary of one dude to keep a project like this going forever.
39 Comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911524
[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/release/17.0/#:~:text=pg%5Fb...
Finding a successor is also not easy nor cheap (in regards to time).
3.8k stars and the name is years of built up trust with you, not with the person you gave it to.
I'd personally do the same. I wouldn't want to be bothered by the future maintainers' choices and get feedback/flak for it. It's a well-known and well-respected way to cycle the name with a "-ng" or "-nx" prefix to signal that this is the newer project with a different set of maintainers.
Being MIT, while is not my favorite license, doesn't give free license to grab and run with things.
Honestly, in my eyes, 3.8K or 38K stars mean nothing, because Open Source is not about you [0], to begin with.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
Why is it never the responsibility of the people using it?
If anyone cares enough they will. People didn’t care enough to pay, so maybe no one cares enough to fork and be the new unpaid custodian
So this was the problem, I thought Snowflake would pick up the sponsorship of this project but since it is a competing database it doesn't really make much sense.
I really wish many critical OSS projects get the sponsorship they need to continue.
Otherwise the software industry is in real trouble.
Forking it just passes the buck onto another maintainer with the same problem, this time without the original creator maintaining it.
"AI driven backups with smartest world class models optimizing every byte stored via deep AI analysis."
With that added, a million dollars is just chimp change. YC alone would be adding them to all the seasons multiple times over summer, winter and monsoon etc.
I doubt that they have sponsored an OSS project or made it sustainable.
They're two non competing verticals. It's a shame Snowflake decided to shrink Crunchy Data's community presence.
I'll have to look at the alternatives again, I think that was mostly WAL-G and Barman. It looks like Barman doesn't support direct backup to object storage, unfortunately. And I find the WAL-G documentation very confusing. What I'm looking for is WAL streaming and object storage support, to minimize the amount of data that can be lost and so I don't have to run my own backup server.
Did you encounter any issues or limitations?
I am feeling a slight unease using such a recent project for things as important as the database. But the polished interface combined with the easy docker deployment made me use it anyway. Restores need some permission tuning on PostgreSQL but otherwise happy.
They are very proud of their github star acquisition curve [0], the "blessing" by Anthropic [1]
But I have yet to verify the Anthropic claim.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1q94uu9/selfhos... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1rklvr7/anthropic...
Anybody know how WAL-G and Barman compare?
https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g
https://github.com/EnterpriseDB/barman
https://xkcd.com/2347/
With WAL archiving you need to wait for a WAL segment to finish before it's backed up. With streaming backups the deadtime is minimized. At least that's as far as I understand this, I didn't get to try this out in practice yet.
On top of that, for availability (and minimizing deadtime), we have 2 replicas using streaming replication. If the lead PG crashes, one of the replicas is promoted to lead (and starts accepting writes), and we "only" lose the writes that haven't been sent over the streaming replication.
You can fully eliminate that window of data loss with synchronous replication (vs the default asynchronous replication - which we use). The write slowdown (replica network round trip + 2nd write at replica) isn't worth it for us
I had just last year prepared a detailed guide for reliable postgre backups to local volume as well as cloud storage, using pgBackRest, for my own projects.. pgBackRest have worked so well for me
https://github.com/freakynit/postgre-backup-and-restore-guid...
Thanks to the author for all the time and effort he put into this project..
Tiered pricing license... tiering based upon annual company revenues... should start super low for small companies (free for individuals), and jump to thousands of dollars per year for 10+ milion revenue companies.
I understand that this might not fully be in the spirit of open-source, but, what's happening currently is way worse.. where giant companies rip off the hardwork of open-source software maintainers without compsensating them adequately.
My org theoretically makes hundreds of millions, unfortunately none of that money is ours. So I get forced into a procurement process for anything that costs more than (ridiculously small limit), and get stuck using the worst in class because it's cheaper.
I thought a while back there were some products that had dual licenses, a fairly open license for private use, use in small companies, but requiring purchase and/or contribution back when used in something like a cloud providers SaaS.
I like open source, but I also can understand the nagging feeling when your (and your contributors work) is used for pure corporate greed.
I like this idea, but the devil is in the details. "profit" is less defined than revenue. You have to specify your accounting principles. What counts as an expense that deducts from revenue to help define profit?
It's not impossible, but there's a lot more variance depending on locality, business structure, etc. than there is with just "revenue".
Of course, I suspect it all comes down to whether the entity offering the license is large enough and well-enough legally armed to force an audit of the organization taking the license. If they're not able to do that, it's all self-reporting anyway.
See all these multinationals paying close to no taxes in the countries where they operate.
Maybe they mean their org makes a lot of money the money for their parent corp, but little of that ( goes into / is reflected in ) their own orgs budget?
Too complicated. Make it GPL (not MIT) and offer dual licensing.
Those corps that need it but are GPL-phobic can have a different license, and can pay for it.
Why would anyone do that? If the person who was most passionate about it for over a dozen years has given up because it was never worth the trouble; what fool would think things will be different going forward?
This is the curse of OSS.
“And many programmers, they say to me, “The people who hire programmers demand this, this and this. If I don't do those things, I'll starve.” It's literally the word they use. Well, you know, as a waiter, you're not going to starve. So, really, they're in no danger.”
- Richard Stallman in 2001 admitting his ideology can’t explain how a programmer can eat
In my opinion, though this is HN heresy, the free software ideology and ethos was naïve, utopian, and clueless about how power works, from day 1. His dream is literally structurally impossible, capitalism or no capitalism, so long as humans need money to eat.
And yes the free software ideology is as naive as a puppy. Every serious individual understands this. Most HN-ers are in a fairly specific bubble (income brackets, geo-location, political leanings, upbringing, the whole package); of course to them this is "heresy". This is well-understood. Happily for me and many others around here, karma farming is not the goal so we don't mind getting some gray arrow treatment every now and then.
> This is the curse of OSS.
There are examples of failing forks. And there are examples of forks that became better than the original. It is not possible to generalize this into one or the other solely via a curse-of-OSS conclusion. Funding will always be an issue; but funding is not necessarily the main or only criterium as to whether a project fails or succeeds.
Just because someone gets tired of working on something eventually doesn't mean everyone else will immediately feel the same way.
He was paid to work on it. That stopped, he continued to work on it in the hopes he could find someone who would hire him to work on it.
That wasn’t true, no one has funded it.
So due to the economic system he no longer maintains it.
That’s your economic system at work. No one is pretending it isn’t there, this is the outcome of it
Also, many programers have spent their entire funds on tokens, so neither are left with extra money nor time.
What's the next-closest thing? wal-g? barman? databasus? I only get to cosplay as a DBA.
https://github.com/databasus/databasus/issues/411
I'll take a look. Thanks!
It was the only solution that seemed to take restoring and validating as seriously as “taking a backup” which lead to an unfortunate situation with my employer. (details here: https://blog.dijit.sh/that-time-my-manager-spend-1m-on-a-bac...)
This is really a major loss. :(
How many actually contributed back to keep it going?
Those that paid, or did any kind of contributions upstream are entitled to be sad.
Others should consider this is what happens to that lego piece in Nebraska, when no one contributes, and everyone uses it.
Why can't others that just used the tool feel sad? It is supposed to be used, it's the whole reason for it to exist; not everyone using it will have technical expertise or money to contribute to it, feeling sad about it when it solved issues for someone is a completely normal response.
The reason for something to exist is someone finds joy doing it. Especially when they are unpaid.
The sadness should be focused on his inability to support himself with a tool that clearly a lot of companies, and people are using and gaining value for.
The sadness doesn't need to be focused anywhere, you can feel sad for more than one thing at a time. People can be sad that a tool they think is great, have relied on, and has been important for their use case is going away while also be sad that such a great tool doesn't get enough support from companies. Both can be true, no need to control what people can or should feel.
I've never heard of this project before and I still think it's a bummer that a tool people liked and that the maintainer cared about was unable to find backing. I was never going to support it; I just heard of it for the first time today and I don't use it! I'm still sad. We're not robots here. We're fellow developers, and we know it's tough out there.
I didn’t even use pgbackrest but I’m still sad to see this.
I should have checked the comments first to determine my eligibility to be sad about this issue, before I had feelings that upset the sadness gatekeepers.
If you thought this project had value, you could’ve contributed to it. You probably still could.
Or, if you think its value is worth $0 (to you), maybe it’s not really that sad (to you).
People are expressing sadness as if there was nothing to be done about it, but, of course, there’s a really straight-forward thing that could’ve been done about it (possibly still could).
Something burning down is a tragedy, beyond anyone's control. It's also possible to love something for its beauty, and be sad that a globally historic monument suffered such an act of god that the irreplaceable art and craftsmanship is gone forever.
Something closing down, perhaps because there was not enough money to sustain its continued operation, when tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people were using it? That's a perfectly appropriate time to remind folks, "if you like free software, consider donating to help sustain the almost full-time effort it takes to keep packages like this alive."
Op said, "this is sad [because] I've been using this," and the implication is, "I want to keep using this but now I can't because it's gone" and making the connection that "one way to prevent this from happening to other packages you like is to contribute financially."
I am an active open source contributor.
Not everything is about money.
I can use Pgbackrest in my side project which does not generate any money. Maybe my side project is another open source project where no one give me money, but I'm still contributing to the open source ecosystem, maybe I reported bugs which help everyone.
There are so may details and possible reasons to not give money and use open source software, but your negative and naive comment totally miss them.
I am therefore quite sad to see this happen. It won't be easy to get feature parity with this great product.
I sincerely hope this is a reversible decision, or perhaps the postgres project could even absorb it into contrib.
If this is really much more than a personal project "for fun, on my leisure time", and it became an actually serious product-level project that provides good value in commercial environments for people, there's clearly an opportunity for a for-profit company to step in and cover that niche. But that'd require that users became customers and actually departed from their money to pay for it :)
I guess most will switch instead to asking who's the next project maintainer to work on it, to whom the new bug reports and complaints can continue to be sent for free. But if there's money to be made by using a tool, there should be money paid for using it too. We "just" need to find the new generation of FOSS Financial Sustainability solutions that actually work! Donations don't make the cut.
Obviously, all contributors have some form of copyright, which may or may not have been waived depending on whether there was an ACL in place and jurisdiction. So he would need to get permission from the copyright holders, maybe in exchange for a percentage of the profit.
It's a bit of a niche as it is, so that's going to be rough in any kind of pricing model, as a large part of that niche is either homebrew types and the other commercial industry that will likely require some more integrations and customization.
But it's MIT license. We can open a company tomorrow, take that code, and start selling it. Further development and improvements of the code could be trivially done openly or behind closed doors. FWIW the author themselves could do that if they wanted.
That applies to local shops as it does open source projects.
> I imagine at some point pgBackRest will be forked, but that will be a new project with new maintainers, and they will need to build trust the same way we did.
I completely understand having to back out of maintenance on an OSS project, but why also slam the door closed on someone taking over? There may be someone very qualified willing to step up, and that could give your existing users continuity.
This feels analgous to deciding to stop maintaining a community garden, but rather than let your neighbor step up, you decide to salt the ground so it can never grow there again, telling your neighbors "you can pull up my plants and move them, but you can't use all the ground and roots that are already there." It just feels bitter.
If no one cared enough to support the project, why does anyone care enough now? It all sounds hollow. Nothing bitter about it.
When you work on a project, any project, you have a responsibility. At some point we all can stop, and become free to not have that responsibility.
The alternative to this seemingly bitter approach is handing over the trust they built to some unknown person who can do whatever they want with the data in a lot of PostgreSQL databases around the world. I think I prefer the bitterness here over blind trust.
hopefully some of the big co's step up & pay a retainer to keep the author going.
The source is still available. Maintaining your own copy and/or paying someone to do it is an option.
While you're at it, look at all the projects you depend on that you would similarly be sad about losing, and set up those donations today.
Not the fact that he made the decision he made.
After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship for much of this time, but there were also many late nights and weekends as I worked to make pgBackRest the project it is today, aided by numerous contributors. Every open-source developer knows exactly what I mean and how much of your life gets devoted to a special project.
Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the project viable.
Like everyone else, I need to make a living, and the range of pgBackRest-related roles is very limited. I can now consider a wider variety of opportunities, but those will not leave me time to work on pgBackRest, which requires a fair amount of time for maintenance, bug fixes, PR reviews, answering issues, etc. That does not even include time to write new features, which is what I really love to do. Rather than do the work poorly and/or sporadically, I think it makes more sense to have a hard stop.
I will post a notice of obsolescence and archive the repository. I imagine at some point pgBackRest will be forked, but that will be a new project with new maintainers, and they will need to build trust the same way we did.
Again, many thanks to all the pgBackRest contributors over the years. It was a pleasure working with you!
I think that’s what the author would want. People to keep using it until it doesn’t work anymore.
what if, bare with me, what if, after a certain amount of time, a certain amount of "requests", a code library can be given to a genAI to maintain; no improvements, no extra features, just bug fixes? This could continue until either someone picks it up, or the open source solution becomes irrelevant, not enough "requests".
Yes, lots of details to work out.
Software Engineers suddenly feel like they're fighting for their lives for employment, and time won't be "wasted" maintaining OSS for free.
We all need to eat.
In other words when it comes to FOSS contribution, developer time can be donated but tokens can't - so as we move into agentic code era all FOSS development carries a cost unless it is purely done by hand (which more often it isn't).
Not saying this is what is going on here but it's presumably a factor if the author was looking for an employer to sponsor development with his labor (and tokens).
I guess it’s anthropic donating the tokens because they give me about $5k of API tokens for the $200 I pay them.
all of these various 3rd party backup tools use these things. Mostly it's QOL stuff that you get from a 3rd party tool. We use barman, very happily: https://pgbarman.org/
Bailey: maintaining a popular project is not that much work.
What?
Is it me ore I am seeing more and more projects being unmaintained due to financial and/or mental fatigue?
[1] https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/author/chergert/
[2] https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter/discussio...
[3] https://discourse.gnome.org/t/stepping-down-as-libxml2-maint...
I've been gradually moving my own stuff to SQLite and git-tracked files partly because of this. Every managed Postgres setup has a dependency tree of tools maintained by people whose funding situation you know nothing about.
General idea still stands, but it is not like this just disappeared and backups will stop working.