Thread: PgBackRest and WAL archive expiry

I successfully configured pgbackrest (pgBackRest 2.52.1) on RHEL 9.4 with EPAS 16.1 for a couple of production servers and a Remote Repo Server.

Seems everything is working as expected. 

I have a serious concern of   archive dir growing day by day..

1. In the  EPAS server    I have   postgres.conf with 

archive_command = 'pgbackrest --stanza=EMI_Repo archive-push %p && cp %p  /data/archive/%f'

The problem is that the   /data/archive  folder is growing  within a few days to 850GB  of 2 TB  partition.

 What is the mechanism to check / expire the WAL  archive dir automatically?

 How others control this behavior and on what criteria so that PITR  won't be badly affected   if we manually delete the WALs from the archive dir ? 

Does  Postgres  or PgBackRest have any command/directive to control the    /data/archive  growth after a considerable  time/usage of disk space without affecting PITR (or on any condition ) ? 

Please shed your expertise to enlighten in this regard for a healthy WAL retention on the DB server as well as on the RepoServer 

Thank you,

Krishane

For any more inputs from DB server ..

161G    ./edb/as16/tablespace/ERSS
161G    ./edb/as16/tablespace
167G    ./edb/as16
167G    ./edb
854G    ./archive
229M    ./backup
1.1T    .
[root@db1 data]# cd /data/archive/
[root@db1 archive]# du -h
854G    .
[root@db1 archive]#



[root@db1 archive]# df -h
Filesystem                    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                      4.0M     0  4.0M   0% /dev
tmpfs                         7.7G   11M  7.7G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                         3.1G   28M  3.1G   1% /run
/dev/mapper/rhel_bc68-root   20G  6.6G   14G  33% /
/dev/mapper/rhel_bc68-app   5.0G   68M  4.9G   2% /app
/dev/mapper/rhel_bc68-data  2.0T  1.1T  979G  52% /data
/dev/sda2                     960M  372M  589M  39% /boot
/dev/sda1                     599M  7.1M  592M   2% /boot/efi
tmpfs                         1.6G   52K  1.6G   1% /run/user/42
tmpfs                         1.6G   36K  1.6G   1% /run/user/0
[root@db1 archive]#


                                        # (change requires restart)
archive_mode = on               # enables archiving; off, on, or always
                                # (change requires restart)
                                # (empty string indicates archive_command should
                                # be used)
                                #
archive_command = 'pgbackrest --stanza=EMI_Repo archive-push %p && cp %p  /data/archive/%f'
                                # placeholders: %p = path of file to archive
                                #               %f = file name only


[root@db1 pg_wal]# du -h
20K     ./archive_status
5.1G    .
[root@db1 pg_wal]#