The pgBackRest community has released pgBackRest 2.60.0, the latest version of the backup and restore tool designed to scale to the largest PostgreSQL databases and workloads. The release keeps the project's broad feature set intact — parallel backup and restore, full/differential/incremental and block incremental backups, multiple repositories, delta restore, parallel asynchronous archiving, encryption, and S3/Azure/GCS/SFTP support — while tightening how backup integrity is enforced. The headline addition is a new option for controlling what happens when page checksums fail.
- Added the
checksum-page-erroroption, contributed by Andrew Pogrebnoi, which makes pgBackRest error out when it encounters invalid page checksums instead of continuing silently. - The option builds on pgBackRest's existing behaviour of validating page checksums during backup when they are enabled on the cluster.
- No other significant new features or improvements are listed in the release announcement beyond the checksum handling change.
For teams running PostgreSQL with data checksums enabled, this closes a gap in the backup pipeline. Previously, a backup could complete even if some pages carried invalid checksums, surfacing problems later during a restore or a corruption investigation. With checksum-page-error, operators can choose to treat bad checksums as a hard failure, so a corrupted backup never looks like a good one in the repository. That matters for malware and ransomware recovery planning, where the value of a backup depends entirely on whether it can be trusted at restore time.
Upgrading is straightforward for most users: packages are available from the PostgreSQL Yum Repository and the PostgreSQL APT Repository, with packages also offered for many other distributions, and source code is downloadable from the project's releases. Review your configuration before enabling the new option, since backups that previously succeeded with checksum warnings may now stop with an error.
Source: https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pgbackrest-2600-released-3416/