Hacker News

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.

I really wish projects like this didn't fall through the cracks and continued to be funded. The struggles of OSS are too real.

This is the right attitude. All the "this is sad" comments make me want to ask, "How sad are you? Sad enough to donate?"

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

I'm one of many wal-g maintainers, it's comparable. I've been inactive for past few years, but back in managed postgres game. Hoping to get support for pg17 incremental backups alongside wal-g's existing delta backups where wal-g compares blocks itself. Be sure to use daemon mode

Sad to see competitor go, I think there's lots of room for improvement here, & C over Golang is particularly nice when postgres wants to run on system without overcommit

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.

>Wow, this is pretty surprising, I was under the impression that this is the leading PG backup/recovery tool.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

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.

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.

I've used barman on somewhat large-ish DBs (30+ TB), and had no complaints with it. I am a DBRE, if that holds any weight.

Backing up multi terabyte production postgres databases is not merely cos playing ha ha

The "closest" would be using Barman with hook scripts (https://docs.pgbarman.org/release/3.18.0/user_guide/hook_scr...) if you rely on cloud storage for storing backups.

https://github.com/aiven-open/pghoard seems like a good option too, but I haven’t tested it yet to have a solid opinion.

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.

Anyone put the standby on ZFS or other filesystems that can take snapshots for backup?

databasus does not do PITR.

pg_probackup seems to be another one.

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.

The favourite model I've seen is the main branch is free, licensed MIT or whatever, but if you want release artifacts that are tested - then you pay for it. You can always compile your own.

Why does sqlite not suffer from the same risk?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> How many actually contributed back to keep it going?

Or why not hire the guy?!

Seriously. Is nobody using this at a level where hiring the primary maintainer is a good idea?

If I didn't use Pgbackrest and never contributed to it, am I entitled to feel sadness?

I am not sure why are you gatekeeping this? People can't comment now that they are sad because of what happened?

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.

People can't be sad now?

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.

> know which projects are in desperate need of funding

keyword: desperate... until the metric becomes the target, and stops being a good metric.

https://claude.com/contact-sales/claude-for-oss open source maintainers can get this.

Chatgpt also has similar https://developers.openai.com/community/codex-for-oss

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.

You could also donate money to allow the devs to spend it on tokens, right?

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]

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...

This project looks nice, albeit a bit young for a backup tool.

Did you encounter any issues or limitations?

Same, was really easy to set up.

I would say "unpaid tool use" is a real problem. Or perhaps "contractless" is actually touching the core issue?

Postgres has built-in backups starting with version 18.

doesn't it still work?

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.

Even with sponsorship, it's not always appreciated such as Vercel backing Svelte, Vue, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/1g4lu5p/am_i_seein...

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.

See the documentation: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/backup.html

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/

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.

wild isn't it

The backups will then be hyper-optimized from three hours down to 5 minutes using devnull compression technologies. Its super effective!

Why even waste all this time and money on backups in the first place? Just don't make mistakes.

Only for their AI to delete the production database and all the backups, and be forced to write an apology.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911524

The A.I will probably steal the code and make it an unmaintainable mess that deletes backups when someone tries to restore

Damn this sucks. Snowflake bought crunchydata right? I know they largely did that because they wanted to push crunchydata's datalake extension past some sort of proverbial finish line as they've been competing with databricks for features, but snowflakes pressers about commitment to open source and postgres in general (which are ofc something no one should take that seriously) feel even more sad when it blows out the floor underneath projects like this which are undoubtedly part of the same postgres extension ecosystem. Snowflake went after crunchydata for that _one_ extension while neglecting the broader world that crunchydata was keeping alive. They can champion support OSS and postgres all they want but they hurt the ecosystem here, kind of a slap in the face to the postgres world.

Thank you for adding this here.

That text is right there in the link, we don't need to read it twice.

adding to that, lots of devs don’t want the hassle of running a software business

*bear, not bare.

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.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> I'm sure with a 3.8k stars repo you'll find competent people willing to continue the work.

Oh yeah, I'm sure you will find lots of competent people. Like Jia Tan, for example. I've heard he is very competent.

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"

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

They are not really forbidding the use of the name (unless they have registered a trademark), they probably simply want to avoid confusion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

See: "It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47918961 (also on today's frontpage)

> Is it really that much effort to maintain something?

yes

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921198 for start

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?