Barman vs mariadb-backup

Barman is an open-source Python administration tool for PostgreSQL disaster recovery, designed for organizations managing business-critical databases. It supports remote backups of multiple PostgreSQL servers and local or remote recovery, including point-in-time recovery. Backup management includes catalogs, incremental and parallel operations, retention policies, and WAL archiving or streaming. Synchronous WAL streaming supports zero data loss (RPO=0). Remote transfers can use rsync over SSH or pg_basebackup; recovery can run locally or over SSH. Barman integrates with PostgreSQL and standard archiving tools such as tar, and can compress WAL files with bzip2, gzip, or a custom method. GPG encryption for backups and WAL depends on configuration. Immutable storage is supported with a required grace period in the current implementation. Its experimental cloud-streaming method is limited to S3-compatible destinations and does not support encryption or direct restores in Barman. It runs on Linux and UNIX-like systems, uses an INI configuration file, and stores metadata locally. Barman costs nothing and is distributed under GPL-3.

mariadb-backup is a free, open-source tool for physical backups of MariaDB tables, including while the server is running. Available on Linux and Windows for self-hosted deployments, it supports InnoDB, Aria, MyISAM, and MyRocks. Backup options include full, incremental, and partial copies, point-in-time recovery, and restoration of individual databases, tables, or partitions. It can make hot online InnoDB backups and uses a nearly non-blocking method for full backups on running systems. It also supports Galera Cluster state snapshot transfers, InnoDB page-compressed tables, and tables protected by data-at-rest encryption; encrypted tables stay encrypted in the backup. Output can be streamed to stdout for piping to tools such as OpenSSL or gzip. Restoring requires preparation with the --prepare option, and safe full or incremental restores require an empty MariaDB data directory. Backup operations connect to the running server and generally require global RELOAD, PROCESS, LOCK TABLES, and BINLOG MONITOR privileges. The listed plan is free.