319 stars · BSD-3-Clause · 0.21.0 (2026-04-29, the repository page and ungh agree) · Track this in Scout
Full and incremental PostgreSQL backups with continuous write-ahead log shipping and point-in-time recovery, written in C for low memory use.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
pgmoneta takes full and incremental backups of PostgreSQL, ships the write-ahead log continuously, and supports point-in-time recovery — putting the database back to the state it had at a specific timestamp. It compresses and can encrypt the stored copies and exposes its own numbers for monitoring.
What it is good for. The situation where a database runs on one machine, the backup is a nightly dump, and nobody has worked out how much work would be lost if the disk failed at four in the afternoon. Point-in-time recovery turns "we lost today" into "we lost four minutes".
- Incremental backups and continuous log shipping, so the gap between the last good copy and now is minutes rather than a day.
- Written in C with small memory use, which matters when the backup tool shares a machine with the database it is protecting.
- BSD-3-Clause, one of the least demanding licences there is. No conditions beyond keeping the copyright notice.
- 319 stars. That is the smallest project in this edition, and it means fewer worked examples and fewer people who have hit your exact problem.
- PostgreSQL only, and it expects a Unix-like system. Packages exist for RPM-based distributions; elsewhere you compile it.
- The newest release, 0.21.0, is dated 29 April 2026 while code landed on 14 September 2026. It is still before version 1.0, so configuration can change.
pgbackrest/pgbackrest4,367 stars, covered in Edition 18; the established choice, also in C, with stronger verification of its own backups and far more history behind it.
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wal-g/wal-gCovered in Edition 29; written in Go and not limited to PostgreSQL, so it also covers MySQL and SQL Server.
Track this in Scout- EnterpriseDB/barman
3,222 stars, a Python backup manager for PostgreSQL built around managing many servers from one place.
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# RPM-based systems, from the PostgreSQL YUM repository
sudo dnf install -y pgmoneta
# or from source
sudo dnf install -y git gcc cmake make libev-devel openssl-devel \
systemd-devel zlib-devel libzstd-devel lz4-devel libssh-devel
git clone https://github.com/pgmoneta/pgmoneta.git
cd pgmoneta && mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && make && sudo make install