Unified Backups: Investigate a solution for backing up PostgreSQL in larger installations (portable backups)

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Context

Relying on pg_dump to create backups works until we reach a certain size. For larger installations, we need to find a different solution that could also rely on some form of WAL log archiving, to allow further on the implementation of a synchronization mechanism to achieve a Consistent Backup.

Discovery

We should investigate the following solutions, try them out to see how hard they are to setup and use and benchmark against an instance of certain size (50 to 100GB):

• pgBackRest (recommended internally by @NikolayS)
• WAL-G (it seems we use this already in production)
  • Some additional content on WAL-G: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/08/18/introducing-wal-g-faster-restores-for-postgres/
• pgmoneta (at time of writting this issue S3 support was still not available but may be when we start looking at it)
• pgbarman