It may not always be necessary to maintain a cluster-wide PostgreSQL backup management server. Sometimes we just want to back up a single instance quickly and efficiently. While pg_basebackup provides at least this much functionality, it doesn't provide WAL management, backup inventories, retention expiration, automatic PITR capabilities, and so on.
pgBackRest is a command-line tool that provides all of the aforementioned features and more, including inline compression, checksum verification, data encryption, and offsite storage. While not really meant to manage an army of PostgreSQL servers, it is more than capable of handling a local installation with aplomb.
This recipe will help to install and bootstrap pgBackRest as simply as possible.
