This is the best summary I could come up with:

Merged yesterday to the Git code for the PostgreSQL database server is support for facilitating incremental backups.

Robert Haas a few months ago restarted work to implement incremental backup support for PostgreSQL, years after he originally pursued the feature to no avail at that time.

But this time around things panned out and merged to PostgreSQL is support for producing incremental backups.

Haas explained in his proposal from June: The basic design of this patch set is pretty simple, and there are three main parts.

Naturally, we don’t find out about blocks that were modified without any write-ahead log record, e.g. hint bit updates, but those are of necessity not critical for correctness, so it’s OK. Second, pg_basebackup has a mode where it can take an incremental backup.

The PostgreSQL 17 database server stable debut is tentatively planned for next September so it will be interesting to see what other exciting changes make it for this next version.

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