Borg Backup – Deduplicating backup program
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Main features
Space efficient storage
Deduplication based on content-defined chunking is used to reduce the number of bytes stored: each file is split into a number of variable length chunks and only chunks that have never been seen before are added to the repository.
To deduplicate, all the chunks in the same repository are considered, no matter whether they come from different machines, from previous backups, from the same backup or even from the same single file.
Compared to other deduplication approaches, this method does NOT depend on:
file/directory names staying the same: So you can move your stuff around without killing the deduplication, even between machines sharing a repo.
complete files or time stamps staying the same: If a big file changes a little, only a few new chunks need to be stored -- this is great for VMs or raw disks.
The absolute position of a data chunk inside a file: Stuff may get shifted and will still be found by the deduplication algorithm.
Speed
performance critical code (chunking, compression, encryption) is implemented in C/Cython
local caching of files/chunks index data
quick detection of unmodified files
Data encryption
All data can be protected using 256-bit AES encryption, data integrity and authenticity is verified using HMAC-SHA256. Data is encrypted clientside.
Compression
All data can be compressed by lz4 (super fast, low compression), zlib (medium speed and compression) or lzma (low speed, high compression).
Off-site backups
Borg can store data on any remote host accessible over SSH. If Borg is installed on the remote host, big performance gains can be achieved compared to using a network filesystem (sshfs, nfs, ...).
Backups mountable as filesystems
Backup archives are mountable as userspace filesystems for easy interactive backup examination and restores (e.g. by using a regular file manager).
Easy installation on multiple platforms
We offer single-file binaries that do not require installing anything -- you can just run them on these platforms:
Linux
Mac OS X
FreeBSD
OpenBSD and NetBSD (no xattrs/ACLs support or binaries yet)
Cygwin (not supported, no binaries yet)
Free and Open Source Software
security and functionality can be audited independently
licensed under the BSD (3-clause) license
Install Borg On ubuntu 16.04
Open the terminal and run the following command
sudo apt-get install borgbackup borgbackup-doc
Using Borg Backup
Before a backup can be made a repository has to be initialized:
$ borg init /path/to/repo
Backup the ~/src and ~/Documents directories into an archive called Monday
$ borg create /path/to/repo::Monday ~/src ~/Documents
The next day create a new archive called Tuesday
$ borg create -v --stats /path/to/repo::Tuesday ~/src ~/Documents
This backup will be a lot quicker and a lot smaller since only new never before seen data is stored. The --stats option causes Borg to output statistics about the newly created archive such as the amount of unique data (not shared with other archives)
List all archives in the repository
$ borg list /path/to/repo
Monday Mon, 2016-04-15 19:14:44
Tuesday Tue, 2016-04-16 19:15:11
List the contents of the Monday archive:
$ borg list /path/to/repo::Monday
drwxr-xr-x user group 0 Mon, 2016-02-15 18:22:30 home/user/Documents
-rw-r--r-- user group 7961 Mon, 2016-02-15 18:22:30 home/user/Documents/Important.doc
...
Restore the Monday archive:
$ borg extract /path/to/repo::Monday
Recover disk space by manually deleting the Monday archive:
$ borg delete /path/to/repo::Monday
If you want more details about the automation back check borg documentation.
