On Monday, January 19, 2026, Alexey Shishkin <
alexey.shishkin@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
Hi, Team !
Some more clarification about pg_basebackup which should be available in the documentation:
- if pg_basebackup works between different versions of the same OS (ex. RHEL8 and RHEL9)
- if pg_basebackup works between different types of OS Linux (ex. RHEL10 and Debian13) or OS Windows (ex. Windows 2016 and Windows 2019)
- if pg_basebackup works between different types of OS (ex. Ubuntu 24.04 and Windows 2022)
- if pg_basebackup works between different platforms (ex. Linux on amd64 and Linux on arm64)
- if pg_basebackup works between 32-bit OS and 64-bit OS
Please don’t top-post.
I agree this these dynamics aren’t readily exposed in the documentation. I disagree that pg_basebackup should be considered as an authoritative location for covering the material. It would simply link to such a location in notes or “see also”.
In short, though, it like pretty much any client program will function correctly regardless of differences with the server. But a physical backup is only truly promised to work if the environment that is processing the data matches the environment that produced the data.
David J.
