Snapshots are backups. Not sufficient backups for some cases, but perfectly fine for others.

The reason I wrote my own tool is because I couldn't find anything for Pg17 at the time and pgbackrest seemed overkill for my needs. Also, the CLI handles backup rotations as well. Barman looks interesting though, I'll definitely have a look, thanks!

pgbackrest was always easy to use in my experience. Not very hard to setup or configure, and low overhead. Supports spool directories for WAL shipping, compression, and block incremental backups (YAY!!!). I ran my last company on it for the last ~6 years I was there. Never any complaints, solid software (which is what you want for backups).

I have been using barman indirectly through CloundNativePG with my latest company, but don't have the operational experience to speak on it yet.

pgbackrest only looks scary because it’s so flexible, but the defaults work great in almost all cases. The most complex thing you’ll need to do is creating a storage bucket to write to, and configure the appropriate storage provider in pgbackrest's config file.

When it’s set up properly, it’s solid as rock. I’d really recommend you check it out again; it likely solves everything you did more elegantly, and also covers a ton of things you didn’t think of. Been there, done that :)

do you still need it? haven't managed pg for a while, but shouldn't pg17 have some solution for backups?

You still need it. There are tools included with Postgres that you can cobble together for a backup solution that is lacking in features and edge case testing. But i'd much rather just use the right tool for the job.

For example, pgBackRest solves real problems with features like block level incremental backups that drastically reduce storage and transfer times for many workloads, automated backup retention policies, multiple repository support for offsite backup redundancy, encryption support, point in time recovery for granular restoration capabilities, and tooling to build standby servers very quickly and efficiently. These features handle edge cases and reduce operational overhead compared to managing scripts around pg_basebackup and WAL archiving yourself. In many environments, those features are required (e.g. encryption).