Re: pgbackrest after a network outage unable to perform backup [fails always] - Mailing list pgsql-general

On Tue, Feb 24, 2026 at 5:18 AM KK CHN <kkchn.in@gmail.com> wrote:

This goes for hours now, not yet finished. Is this normal behaviour ?

Yes, if there is a lot of WAL

My goal is to initiate a full backup afresh on the reposerver , so it doesn't matter all the old piled up WAL files

You will need to (carefully!) disable pgbackrest archiving, clean up the old WAL, then start it up again. Basic sequence:

1. Set archive_command to '/bin/true'

2. Kill any existing pgbackrest processes, empty out the spool directory

3. Wait for Postgres to cleanup / recycle the WAL (speed up with a manual CHECKPOINT)

4. Restore your archive_command to the pgbackrest version

5. Run pgbackrest check to verify WALs are being archived again

6. Run a full backup

Ideally, test these steps on a dev system, and understand why each step and why in that order. :) 

 

Cheers,

Greg

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