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pgBackRest in HA setups: deployment patterns that work

Event: PGConf Europe 2026

Location: Valencia

Dates: October 20, 2026 – October 23, 2026

Presentation: October 20, 2026 , 16:05

Link: On event website

Speaker: Stefan Fercot

The events of last April reminded us just how important pgBackRest has become. The strong reaction from users, vendors, and sponsors showed that this backup tool is relied upon in an extraordinary range of environments — from small deployments to some of the most critical PostgreSQL infrastructures in production today.

Yet many organizations use only a fraction of what pgBackRest can offer. Having a solid recovery plan is essential, because in a real outage, just having a backup is not enough.

pgBackRest provides a remarkably flexible foundation that can fit many different setups: using a dedicated backup host, taking backups from standby servers, or sending data straight to the cloud with S3, Azure, or Google Cloud. However, many of these deployment patterns remain largely unknown or underutilized.

In this talk, we’ll go beyond the basics and look at several pgBackRest deployment patterns that can be combined for better resilience, performance, and cost efficiency. We’ll discuss setups that mix backup hosts and cloud storage, make use of multiple standbys, and keep things running smoothly in High-Availability environments.

Based on real-world experience deploying this “undocumented magical solution” in highly critical systems, this session will show how to unlock pgBackRest’s full potential and design resilient backup architectures that meet the requirements of modern HA environments.

Event

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pgBackRest in HA setups: deployment patterns that work

Speakers

Stefan Fercot

Stefan Fercot

Stefan Fercot is a Senior Software Engineer at Percona, working on PostgreSQL and its ecosystem as part of Percona’s PostgreSQL Engineering team, with a primary focus on pgBackRest development and upstream open-source contributions.

As a long-time pgBackRest contributor, Stefan has a particular interest in backup tools, disaster recovery procedures and high-availability architectures. He is also Vice-Treasurer of PostgreSQL Europe, reflecting his active involvement in the PostgreSQL community.

Mastodon: fosstodon.org/@pgstef

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