I've never used Barman and would love to hear more from people who have used it.<p>I've used WAL-E[1] in production for almost a year now. It was painless to setup and configure and has been working flawlessly for the entire time. I've had to do database recoveries, point-in-time recoveries, and database upgrades, and WAL-E has worked through all of them.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/heroku/WAL-E" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/heroku/WAL-E</a>
While looking beyond a pg_dump-style approach to backup/recovery, I was considering <a href="https://github.com/heroku/WAL-E" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/heroku/WAL-E</a> and discovered Barman. It's also open source, and looks like a strong contender.
Another option which I've been looking at is pg_rman ( <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pg-rman/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/pg-rman/</a> ) .<p>It's several years old, from NTT, and with a BSD license. It seems a bit simpler , and lists a couple of useful features such as compression and backup maintenance which don't seem to be in barman yet.<p>Also, from looking at the barman FAQ : "We are currently seeking sponsors willing to fund the addition of this feature to the open-source version." is something it would be nice to get clarification on, in case some features in the future only go into a closed version.