PostgreSQL backup tool gets some backup of its own after sole maintainer sounds alarm
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PostgreSQL backup tool gets some backup of its own after sole maintainer sounds alarm
AWS, Percona, Supabase, pgEdge, and Tiger Data rally round pgBackRest with funding pledge
Lindsay Clark
Lindsay<br>Clark
Published<br>wed 20 May 2026 // 10:15 UTC
A group of companies including AWS and<br>Percona have stepped up to fund the maintenance of pgBackRest, an extension to the widely used open source database PostgreSQL, after its future was left hanging in the balance.<br>The tool provides a backup and restore<br>solution for the PostgreSQL RDBMS, which has become more or less ubiquitous in<br>services offered by cloud providers including AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure.<br>It had been maintained for the last 13 years by David Steele, a principal architect at Crunchy Data – which<br>provides PostgreSQL managed cloud services, Kubernetes deployments, and<br>on-prem solutions – until June last year. At that time, cloud data analytics<br>company Snowflake bought Crunchy Data to help provide a transactional<br>database.
A Snowflake spokesperson said: "Open source software is built on broad community participation, and we are pleased to see continued support for pgBackRest from organizations across the ecosystem. Snowflake supports a variety of open source projects, including within the Postgres ecosystem, and we look forward to continued community collaboration."
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Last month, Steele announced he was no<br>longer able to maintain the project. "Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been<br>maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to<br>continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts<br>to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the<br>project viable," he said.
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Steele said he was hoping to continue the<br>project, but lack of support was forcing him to consider new roles that would not leave him enough time.<br>A group of interested companies have now banded<br>together to fund ongoing development. "Their support means the project is no<br>longer reliant on a single sponsor, giving pgBackRest the stability it needs<br>for the long term," Steele said.
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As well as AWS and Percona, sponsors<br>include Supabase, which provides a back-end platform built on PostgreSQL, and pgEdge,<br>which offers open source distributed PostgreSQL.<br>Open source consultancy and technology<br>company Percona said thousands of organizations depend on the pgBackRest<br>extension for backup and recovery of PostgreSQL, including customers<br>running Percona's Expert Support for PostgreSQL.<br>"pgBackRest has been our recommended<br>backup solution/tool for years. When its future came into question,<br>coordinating with other companies to keep it healthy was a straightforward<br>decision – for our customers and for the community," said Percona CEO Peter Farkas.<br>The group of companies, which also includes<br>Tiger Data, creators of TimescaleDB, have committed to supporting bug<br>fixes, feature work, and community reviews. Percona said it plans to bring a new maintainer on board who can help provide continuity in the long term. The project is also looking to recruit more sponsors and reduce reliance on a single maintainer. ®
aws<br>percona<br>postgresql<br>databases<br>pgbackrest<br>open source software
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