--- title: pgBackRest archived after 13 years as maintainer loses... description: pgBackRest, the widely-used PostgreSQL backup tool, has been archived by its creator David Steele after 13 years of development. The project ended not due to... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/pgbackrest-archived-after-13-years-as-maintainer-loses-corporate-backing-xgkrrfvh7 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: pgBackRest archived after 13 years as maintainer loses corporate backing | daily.dev og:description: pgBackRest, the widely-used PostgreSQL backup tool, has been archived by its creator David Steele after 13 years of development. The project ended not due to... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/pgbackrest-archived-after-13-years-as-maintainer-loses-corporate-backing-xgkrrfvh7 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/XgKRRFvH7.png og:image:alt: pgBackRest archived after 13 years as maintainer loses corporate backing og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # pgBackRest archived after 13 years as maintainer loses corporate backing **[Collections](https://daily.dev/sources/collections)** · 2 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary pgBackRest, the widely-used PostgreSQL backup tool, has been archived by its creator David Steele after 13 years of development. The project ended not due to technical failure but because funding dried up after Crunchy Data was sold and no new sponsorship materialized. v2.58.0 is the final release. The post covers why pgBackRest was critical infrastructure for PostgreSQL deployments, highlights Barman (maintained by EDB) as the most credible alternative, and raises broader questions about open source sustainability. A community fork is possible but would require real financial commitment from organizations that depend on the tool. ## Content ## What happened David Steele has archived pgBackRest and declared the project dead. After 13 years of development, the widely-used PostgreSQL backup tool is no longer maintained, with v2.58.0 as its final release. The reason is straightforward and depressing: money ran out. Crunchy Data, Steele's corporate sponsor, was sold. He couldn't land a new position or find alternative sponsorship. Supabase was the last company to sponsor the project before it folded. Steele has said he'd welcome forks, but noted that any fork would need to rebuild community trust on its own and should adopt a new name. ## Why this matters pgBackRest wasn't just another backup tool. For most PostgreSQL shops, it was *the* backup tool — handling incremental backups, parallel processing, compression, encryption, and point-in-time recovery in ways that pg_basebackup and pg_dump simply don't. It was the kind of infrastructure that quietly underpins a lot of production databases. That's what makes this sting. The project didn't die because it was bad or obsolete. It died because one person couldn't keep the lights on. There's something worth sitting with here: the same industry pouring billions into AI infrastructure couldn't sustain funding for a critical piece of database tooling that thousands of companies depend on. That's not a knock on any one company — it's a structural problem with how open source maintenance gets valued (or doesn't). ## What to use instead Right now, the most credible alternative is [Barman](https://pgbarman.org/), maintained by EDB. It covers most of what pgBackRest did and has active development behind it. It's not a drop-in replacement, but it's the most mature option available. pg_basebackup and pg_dump are still there for simpler setups, but they're not substitutes for what pgBackRest offered at scale. ## What should happen next If your company has been running pgBackRest in production, this is a reasonable moment to ask what obligations come with that. The codebase is there. The documentation is there. What's missing is someone paid to maintain it. A fork is possible. Whether it happens depends on whether enough organizations decide the tool is worth funding rather than just replacing. Given how embedded pgBackRest is in PostgreSQL deployments, there's a real case for it — but that case needs to translate into actual sponsorship, not just goodwill. --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#postgresql](https://daily.dev/tags/postgresql) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/pgbackrest-archived-after-13-years-as-maintainer-loses-corporate-backing-xgkrrfvh7) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"pgBackRest archived after 13 years as maintainer loses corporate backing","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/pgbackrest-archived-after-13-years-as-maintainer-loses-corporate-backing-xgkrrfvh7","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/pgbackrest-archived-after-13-years-as-maintainer-loses-corporate-backing-xgkrrfvh7"},"datePublished":"2026-04-27T14:07:34.223Z","dateModified":"2026-05-03T20:11:09.726Z","description":"pgBackRest, the widely-used PostgreSQL backup tool, has been archived by its creator David Steele after 13 years of development. 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