If you manage PostgreSQL in production, you probably felt a chill when the news hit Hacker News: pgbackrest appears to no longer be actively maintained . For a tool that's been the backbone of PostgreSQL backup strategies for years, that's a big deal. Let's talk about what this means practically, how to assess your exposure, and how to migrate to an alternative without losing sleep. Why This Hurts pgbackrest has been the gold standard for PostgreSQL backup and restore for a long time. It handles incremental backups, parallel backup/restore, encryption, and repository management in a way that pg_dump simply can't match. A lot of production setups — including several I've worked on — depend on it heavily. When a critical infrastructure tool loses active maintenance, you're looking at a few real problems: Security patches stop. Any CVEs discovered going forward won't get fixed upstream. New PostgreSQL versions may break compatibility. PostgreSQL 17 and beyond might introduce changes pgbackrest can't handle.…