Online Backups with no archives in PGBackRest

Reducing storage costs by avoiding archive storage

September 28, 2025 - 2 mins read

Even tho is not documented in the official documentation, it is possible to avoid storing archives on PGBackRest setups. In certain scenarios, you may want to disregard storing archives for reducing costs, specially if you are using cloud storage for your backups.

Those situations could be:

Tests environments, whether you run intensive tests but you don’t need or care about PITR (Point in Time Recovery).
Highly updated Postgres databases, where you can recover changes by other means, such as scrapping or restoring from external sources.

⚠️

Not storing archives may lead you to data loss if you don’t have a proper strategy for handling the deltas.
You still need to store archives during backup execution if you want online backups. Otherwise, they won’t be recoverable.
If you don’t want to store archives at all, you need to run backup offline. That is, stopping your instance and executing pgbackrest backup.

Configuration

Configuration on your postgresql.conf:

archive_mode=on
archive_command='test -f /tmp/pgbackrest/<STANZA>-backup.lock || exit 0 && pgbackrest --stanza=<STANZA> archive-push %p'

In your pgbackrest command, you need to add the --archive-check=n option:

    OPTION="full" # or "incr"

    pgbackrest --stanza=<STANZA> --type="${OPTION}" backup \
        --archive-check=n \
        --archive-timeout=1d --log-level-console=info \
        --buffer-size '16MiB' \
        --no-resume # optional

How this works?

The --archive-check=n option avoids pre-checking the archive status. This makes the command not to fail if archives are not being stored.

The archive_command shown above, will only store archives if backup is running, checking if the pgbackrest lock file exists.

Ups, I wan’t archives now

If you want to re-enable archives, you need to run a full backup after changing your archive_command, otherwise, those stored archives would be useless for PITR.

References

Here, you can explore the original threads about this topic: