From what I can find Postgres 17 [1] introduced incremental backups to pg_basebackup, refined in 18, but nowhere near the full featureset of pgBackRest. Is that what you meant? Having builtin incremental replication to a S3-compatible storage would be great.
You can of course take a SQL dump that is version-independent, but if you're serious about creating backups, you want to take backups of the actual on-disk format of the WAL, because that's more efficient and also the only practical way to get point-in-time recovery. (For the efficiency, you could alternatively also take ZFS snapshots, which will work independently of the Postgres version, but those also don't give you PITR.) The WAL format is a Postgres implementation detail and therefore tools wanting to read and write it need maintenance whenever the format changes (which can happen on major version releases).
Postgres has built-in backups starting with version 18.
From what I can find Postgres 17 [1] introduced incremental backups to pg_basebackup, refined in 18, but nowhere near the full featureset of pgBackRest. Is that what you meant? Having builtin incremental replication to a S3-compatible storage would be great.
[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/release/17.0/#:~:text=pg%5Fb...
doesn't it still work?
Yes! But I'm assuming it will prevent me from upgrading to Postgres 19 in the future.
I'm not familiar with the internals, but is backing up that coupled to Postgres version? That feels so brittle to me.
You can of course take a SQL dump that is version-independent, but if you're serious about creating backups, you want to take backups of the actual on-disk format of the WAL, because that's more efficient and also the only practical way to get point-in-time recovery. (For the efficiency, you could alternatively also take ZFS snapshots, which will work independently of the Postgres version, but those also don't give you PITR.) The WAL format is a Postgres implementation detail and therefore tools wanting to read and write it need maintenance whenever the format changes (which can happen on major version releases).