PostgreSQL17 does not start after Barman PITR recovery — what am I missing?

[sudha]

Hi everyone,

I have taken a full backup using Barman with the following details:

I’m trying to perform a point-in-time recovery (PITR) using this command:

barman recover --get-wal --remote-ssh-command "ssh postgres@sudha-dev-vm" --target-time="2025-08-07 10:38:07.471841+00:00" bitbucket-pgdb1-u22 20250807T103648 /var/lib/postgresql/17/data
The recovery seems to complete, but when I try to start the PostgreSQL server, it fails to start and doesn’t generate any new logs.

Am I missing a step post-recovery, such as adjusting postgresql.auto.conf, or could it be a WAL restore issue?

Would appreciate any insights.

Thanks in advance!

[Martin Marques]

Several recommendations:

- Specify the version of Barman you are using

- Check the logs (postgres logs) and system logs with journalctl

- If it's failing with systemclt, try bringing it up with pg_ctl

Despite asking for the Barman version, I can say that there are no changes needed in PG17, at least none that I know about.

[sudha]

My bad — I realized I was using the wrong destination data directory in the barman recover command — used /var/lib/postgresql/17/data instead of the correct /var/lib/postgresql/17/main, which caused PostgreSQL to fail at startup