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### BORG: a powerful, deduplicating backup system ### |
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Today I discovered a new backuping program called BORG (or "borgbackup"). So |
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far, I was using rdiff-backup - an incremental backuping tool that worked very |
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well for me during a few years. But BORG is better. |
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BORG's homepage: https://www.borgbackup.org/ |
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=== WHY ? ==================================================================== |
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The main difference between the two is that rdiff-backup is an incremental |
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backup, while BORG is a deduplicating backup. Basically this means that if I |
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rename a 1 GB file, rdiff-backup will have to pull it entirely again, while |
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BORG won't. Also, BORG supports archive encryption, while rdiff-backup does |
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not - this is an important factor for me, since I keep my backups on a host |
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that I do not trust that much any more. |
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=== INSTALLATION: ENTER THE PYTHON'S WORLD OF PAIN =========================== |
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The installation process is highly annoying, since the software is a python |
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thing. As with such "modern" stuff, installing anything requires sorting out |
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lots of dependencies, incompatible versions etc, even using the presumably |
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easy "pip3 install" way... At the end of the day, installation of this 10 MiB |
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program required pulling hundreds of MiB of dependencies (gcc, g++, and lots |
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of libraries). Well, life I guess. |
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Anyhow - once the installation process is done, the program works flawlessly. |
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=== QUICK START USAGE ======================================================== |
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These are the commands I use for my needs now. For convenience, I start by |
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defining the following two env variables on the backup-sending host: |
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export BORG_PASSPHRASE='HERE_MY_ENCRYPTION_PASSPHRASE' |
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export BORG_REPO='ssh://[email protected]/srv/borg' |
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...and then: |
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# Initialize a BORG repository on remote server (one time only) |
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$ borg init --progress --encryption=repokey "$BORG_REPO" |
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# Compute, compress, encrypt and send a backup of /root and /srv |
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$ borg create --progress --verbose --compression=zlib \\ |
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"$BORG_REPO"::'{hostname}-{now}' /root /srv |
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# See the list of backups available on remote host |
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$ borg list "$BORG_REPO" |
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# Remove backups, keeping only one per day and no more than 30 |
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$ borg prune --list --stats --keep-daily=30 "$BORG_REPO" |
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# See some nice stats about on-disk data usage of the BORG backups |
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$ borg info "$BORG_REPO" |
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===================================================================== EOF ==== |
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