When the future of pgBackRest suddenly became uncertain, the PostgreSQL ecosystem reacted quickly.
At Percona, we believed the most important question was not:
what replaces it?
but:
how do we ensure pgBackRest remains healthy, sustainable, and open for everyone?
That distinction matters.
pgBackRest is critical infrastructure used by enterprises around the world to protect some of their most important data. When projects like this face maintainership or sustainability challenges, organizations need trusted open source partners that can help provide continuity, stability, and confidence.
From the beginning, Percona believed the best outcome for pgBackRest was not fragmentation, forks, or closed alternatives.
What the project needed was continuity.
That meant working collaboratively across the ecosystem to help strengthen the project itself:
– coordinating funding discussions
– contributing engineering resources
– helping expand the maintainer base
– encouraging participation from multiple organizations
The goal was never to control the project. The goal was to help ensure pgBackRest remained open, healthy, and sustainable for the entire PostgreSQL community.
Those efforts are already producing results.
A joint effort across maintainers, contributors, and multiple companies is helping ensure pgBackRest returns in a stronger and healthier position than before. Funding, engineering support, and long-term sustainability discussions are now happening collaboratively across the ecosystem.
Percona is proud to play a part in that effort.
Just as importantly, this moment would likely never have happened without David Steele bringing visibility to the sustainability realities behind maintaining critical open source infrastructure.
For more than a decade, David built pgBackRest into one of the most trusted backup and recovery solutions in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. The current momentum around the project reflects the value of that work and the trust the community has in what he created.
The announcement around renewed support for pgBackRest is not a story about one company “saving” a project. It is a story about the PostgreSQL ecosystem stepping up together to support critical open infrastructure.
That is how healthy open source ecosystems should work.
At Percona, this is not simply a business decision. It reflects how we see open source itself: the strongest ecosystems are built in the open, through collaboration, shared responsibility, and long-term commitment.
Enterprises need more than software alone. They need trusted partners that can help support continuity, sustainability, and long-term ecosystem health.
We believe critical open source infrastructure is strongest when it remains:
– community driven
– vendor neutral
– collaboratively maintained
– available to everyone
The pgBackRest story is also a reminder that the PostgreSQL ecosystem needs stronger long-term sustainability structures around critical community infrastructure.
Whether that ultimately takes the form of an ecosystem foundation or another collaborative model, the goal should remain the same: ensuring the projects enterprises rely on stay healthy, trusted, and sustainably maintained.
Because ultimately:
the way is open.
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