BORG-DEDUPLICATINGARCHIVER(1)

NAME
borg-deduplicatingarchiver - Borg - Deduplicating Archiver 0.29.0

BorgBackup Installation and Basic Usage

BorgBackup (short: Borg) is a deduplicating backup program. Optionally, it supports compression and authenticated encryption.

The main goal of Borg is to provide an efficient and secure way to backup data. The data deduplication technique used makes Borg suitable for daily backups since only changes are stored. The authenticated encryption technique makes it suitable for backups to not fully trusted targets.

See the installation manual or, if you have already downloaded Borg, docs/installation.rst to get started with Borg.

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 will 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 does not require installing anything - you can just run it on the supported 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

EASY TO USE

Initialize a new backup repository and create a backup archive:

$ borg init /mnt/backup
$ borg create /mnt/backup::Monday ~/Documents

Now doing another backup, just to show off the great deduplication:

$ borg create --stats -C zlib,6 /mnt/backup::Tuesday ~/Documents
Archive name: Tuesday
Archive fingerprint: 387a5e3f9b0e792e91c...
Start time: Tue Mar 25 12:00:10 2014
End time:   Tue Mar 25 12:00:10 2014
Duration: 0.08 seconds
Number of files: 358
                  Original size    Compressed size    Deduplicated size
This archive:          57.16 MB           46.78 MB            151.67 kB  <--- !
All archives:         114.02 MB           93.46 MB             44.81 MB

For a graphical frontend refer to our complementary project BorgWeb.

•   Main Web Site

•   Releases

•   PyPI packages

•   ChangeLog

•   GitHub

•   Issue Tracker

•   Bounties & Fundraisers

•   Mailing List

•   License

NOTES

Borg is a fork of Attic and maintained by "The Borg collective".

  Differences between Attic and Borg

Here's a (incomplete) list of some major changes:

•   more open, faster paced development (see issue #1)

•   lots of attic issues fixed (see issue #5)

•   less chunk management overhead via --chunker-params option (less memory and disk usage)

•   faster remote cache resync (useful when backing up multiple machines into same repo)

•   compression: no, lz4, zlib or lzma compression, adjustable compression levels

•   repokey replaces problematic passphrase mode (you can't change the passphrase nor the pbkdf2 iteration count in "passphrase" mode)

•   simple sparse file support, great for virtual machine disk files

•   can read special files (e.g. block devices) or from stdin, write to stdout

•   mkdir-based locking is more compatible than attic's posix locking

•   uses fadvise to not spoil / blow up the fs cache

•   better error messages / exception handling

•   better output for verbose mode, progress indication

•   tested on misc. Linux systems, 32 and 64bit, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X

    Please read the ChangeLog (or CHANGES.rst in the source distribution) for more information.

    BORG IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH ORIGINAL ATTIC (but there is a one-way conversion).

    EXPECT THAT WE WILL BREAK COMPATIBILITY REPEATEDLY WHEN MAJOR RELEASE NUMBER CHANGES (like when going from 0.x.y to 1.0.0).

    NOT RELEASED DEVELOPMENT VERSIONS HAVE UNKNOWN COMPATIBILITY PROPERTIES.

    THIS IS SOFTWARE IN DEVELOPMENT, DECIDE YOURSELF WHETHER IT FITS YOUR NEEDS.

    Borg is distributed under a 3-clause BSD license, see License for the complete license.

    Build Status Test Coverage

  Installation

There are different ways to install Borg:

•   Distribution Package - easy and fast if a package is available from your distribution.

•   Standalone Binary - easy and fast, we provide a ready-to-use binary file that comes bundled with all dependencies.

•   From Source, either:

•   Using pip - installing a source package with pip needs more installation steps and requires all dependencies with development headers and a compiler.

•   Using git - for developers and power users who want to have the latest code or use revision control (each release is tagged).

  Distribution Package

Some distributions might offer a ready-to-use borgbackup package which can be installed with the package manager. As Borg is still a young project, such a package might be not available for your system yet.
Distribution | Source | Command
Arch Linux | [community] | pacman -S borg
Debian | unstable/sid | apt install borgbackup
Ubuntu | `Xenial Xerus 16.04`_ | apt install borgbackup
OS X | Brew cask | brew cask install borgbackup

Please ask package maintainers to build a package or, if you can package / submit it yourself, please help us with that! See #105 on github to followup on packaging efforts.

If a package is available, it might be interesting to check its version and compare that to our latest release and review the changes.

  Standalone Binary

Borg binaries (generated with pyinstaller) are available on the releases page for the following platforms:

•   Linux: glibc >= 2.13 (ok for most supported Linux releases)

•   Mac OS X: 10.10 (unknown whether it works for older releases)

•   FreeBSD: 10.2 (unknown whether it works for older releases)

    To install such a binary, just drop it into a directory in your PATH, make borg readable and executable for its users and then you can run borg:

    sudo cp borg-linux64 /usr/local/bin/borg
    sudo chown root:root /usr/local/bin/borg
    sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/borg

    If a new version is released, you will have to manually download it and replace the old version using the same steps as shown above.

  From Source

  Dependencies

To install Borg from a source package (including pip), you have to install the following dependencies first:

•   Python 3 >= 3.2.2. Even though Python 3 is not the default Python version on most systems, it is usually available as an optional install.

•   OpenSSL >= 1.0.0

•   libacl (that pulls in libattr also)

•   liblz4

•   some Python dependencies, pip will automatically install them for you

•   optionally, the llfuse Python package is required if you wish to mount an archive as a FUSE filesystem. FUSE >= 2.8.0 is required for llfuse.

    In the following, the steps needed to install the dependencies are listed for a selection of platforms. If your distribution is not covered by these instructions, try to use your package manager to install the dependencies. On FreeBSD, you may need to get a recent enough OpenSSL version from FreeBSD ports.

    After you have installed the dependencies, you can proceed with steps outlined under Using pip.

  Debian / Ubuntu

Install the dependencies with development headers:

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev python3-pip python-virtualenv
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev openssl
sudo apt-get install libacl1-dev libacl1
sudo apt-get install liblz4-dev liblz4-1
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev fuse pkg-config    # optional, for FUSE support

In case you get complaints about permission denied on /etc/fuse.conf: on Ubuntu this means your user is not in the fuse group. Add yourself to that group, log out and log in again.

  Fedora / Korora

Install the dependencies with development headers:

sudo dnf install python3 python3-devel python3-pip python3-virtualenv
sudo dnf install openssl-devel openssl
sudo dnf install libacl-devel libacl
sudo dnf install lz4-devel
sudo dnf install fuse-devel fuse pkgconfig         # optional, for FUSE support

  Mac OS X

Assuming you have installed homebrew, the following steps will install all the dependencies:

brew install python3 lz4 openssl
pip3 install virtualenv

For FUSE support to mount the backup archives, you need at least version 3.0 of FUSE for OS X, which is available as a pre-release.

  Cygwin

NOTE: Running under Cygwin is experimental and has only been tested with Cygwin (x86-64) v2.1.0.

Use the Cygwin installer to install the dependencies:

python3 python3-setuptools
python3-cython  # not needed for releases
binutils gcc-core
libopenssl openssl-devel
liblz4_1 liblz4-devel  # from cygwinports.org
git make openssh

You can then install pip and virtualenv:

easy_install-3.4 pip
pip install virtualenv

In case the creation of the virtual environment fails, try deleting this file:

/usr/lib/python3.4/__pycache__/platform.cpython-34.pyc

  Using pip

Virtualenv can be used to build and install Borg without affecting the system Python or requiring root access. Using a virtual environment is optional, but recommended except for the most simple use cases.

NOTE: If you install into a virtual environment, you need to activate it first (source borg-env/bin/activate), before running borg. Alternatively, symlink borg-env/bin/borg into some directory that is in your PATH so you can just run borg.

This will use pip to install the latest release from PyPi:

virtualenv --python=python3 borg-env
source borg-env/bin/activate
# install Borg + Python dependencies into virtualenv
pip install 'llfuse<0.41'  # optional, for FUSE support
                           # 0.41 and 0.41.1 have unicode issues at install time
pip install borgbackup

To upgrade Borg to a new version later, run the following after activating your virtual environment:

pip install -U borgbackup

  Using git

This uses latest, unreleased development code from git. While we try not to break master, there are no guarantees on anything.

# get borg from github
git clone https://github.com/borgbackup/borg.git
virtualenv --python=python3 borg-env
source borg-env/bin/activate   # always before using!
# install borg + dependencies into virtualenv
pip install sphinx  # optional, to build the docs
pip install 'llfuse<0.41'  # optional, for FUSE support
                           # 0.41 and 0.41.1 have unicode issues at install time
cd borg
pip install -r requirements.d/development.txt
pip install -e .  # in-place editable mode
# optional: run all the tests, on all supported Python versions
# requires fakeroot, available through your package manager
fakeroot -u tox

NOTE: As a developer or power user, you always want to use a virtual environment.

  Quick Start

This chapter will get you started with Borg. The first section presents a simple step by step example that uses Borg to backup data. The next section continues by showing how backups can be automated.

  Important note about free space

Before you start creating backups, please make sure that there is always a good amount of free space on the filesystem that has your backup repository (and also on ~/.cache). It is hard to tell how much, maybe 1-5%.

If you run out of disk space, it can be hard or impossible to free space, because Borg needs free space to operate - even to delete backup archives. There is a --save-space option for some commands, but even with that Borg will need free space to operate.

You can use some monitoring process or just include the free space information in your backup log files (you check them regularly anyway, right?).

Also helpful:

•   create a big file as a "space reserve", that you can delete to free space

•   if you use LVM: use a LV + a filesystem that you can resize later and have some unallocated PEs you can add to the LV.

•   consider using quotas

•   use prune regularly

  A step by step example

1.  Before a backup can be made a repository has to be initialized:

    $ borg init /mnt/backup

2.  Backup the ~/src and ~/Documents directories into an archive called Monday:

    $ borg create /mnt/backup::Monday ~/src ~/Documents

3.  The next day create a new archive called Tuesday:

    $ borg create --stats /mnt/backup::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):

    Archive name: Tuesday
    Archive fingerprint: 387a5e3f9b0e792e91ce87134b0f4bfe17677d9248cb5337f3fbf3a8e157942a
    Start time: Tue Mar 25 12:00:10 2014
    End time:   Tue Mar 25 12:00:10 2014
    Duration: 0.08 seconds
    Number of files: 358
                           Original size      Compressed size    Deduplicated size
    This archive:               57.16 MB             46.78 MB            151.67 kB
    All archives:              114.02 MB             93.46 MB             44.81 MB

4.  List all archives in the repository:

    $ borg list /mnt/backup
    Monday                               Mon Mar 24 11:59:35 2014
    Tuesday                              Tue Mar 25 12:00:10 2014

5.  List the contents of the Monday archive:

    $ borg list /mnt/backup::Monday
    drwxr-xr-x user  group         0 Jan 06 15:22 home/user/Documents
    -rw-r--r-- user  group      7961 Nov 17  2012 home/user/Documents/Important.doc
    ...

6.  Restore the Monday archive:

    $ borg extract /mnt/backup::Monday

7.  Recover disk space by manually deleting the Monday archive:

    $ borg delete /mnt/backup::Monday

    NOTE: Borg is quiet by default. Add the -v or --verbose option to get progress reporting during command execution.

  Automating backups

The following example script backs up /home and /var/www to a remote server. The script also uses the borg_prune subcommand to maintain a certain number of old archives:

#!/bin/sh
REPOSITORY=username@remoteserver.com:backup
# Backup all of /home and /var/www except a few
# excluded directories
borg create --stats                             \
    $REPOSITORY::`hostname`-`date +%Y-%m-%d`    \
    /home                                       \
    /var/www                                    \
    --exclude /home/*/.cache                    \
    --exclude /home/Ben/Music/Justin\ Bieber    \
    --exclude '*.pyc'
# Use the `prune` subcommand to maintain 7 daily, 4 weekly and 6 monthly
# archives of THIS machine. --prefix `hostname`- is very important to
# limit prune's operation to this machine's archives and not apply to
# other machine's archives also.
borg prune -v $REPOSITORY --prefix `hostname`- \
    --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6

  Backup compression

Default is no compression, but we support different methods with high speed or high compression:

If you have a quick repo storage and you want a little compression:

$ borg create --compression lz4 /mnt/backup::repo ~

If you have a medium fast repo storage and you want a bit more compression (N=0..9, 0 means no compression, 9 means high compression):

$ borg create --compression zlib,N /mnt/backup::repo ~

If you have a very slow repo storage and you want high compression (N=0..9, 0 means low compression, 9 means high compression):

$ borg create --compression lzma,N /mnt/backup::repo ~

You'll need to experiment a bit to find the best compression for your use case. Keep an eye on CPU load and throughput.

  Repository encryption

Repository encryption is enabled at repository creation time:

$ borg init --encryption=repokey|keyfile PATH

When repository encryption is enabled all data is encrypted using 256-bit AES encryption and the integrity and authenticity is verified using HMAC-SHA256.

All data is encrypted on the client before being written to the repository. This means that an attacker who manages to compromise the host containing an encrypted archive will not be able to access any of the data, even as the backup is being made.

Borg supports different methods to store the AES and HMAC keys.

repokey mode
    The key is stored inside the repository (in its "config" file). Use this mode if you trust in your good passphrase giving you enough protection. The repository server never sees the plaintext key.

keyfile mode
    The key is stored on your local disk (in ~/.borg/keys/). Use this mode if you want "passphrase and having-the-key" security.

    In both modes, the key is stored in encrypted form and can be only decrypted by providing the correct passphrase.

    For automated backups the passphrase can be specified using the BORG_PASSPHRASE environment variable.

    NOTE: Be careful about how you set that environment, see this note about password environments for more information.

    IMPORTANT: The repository data is totally inaccessible without the key:** Make a backup copy of the key file (keyfile mode) or repo config file (repokey mode) and keep it at a safe place, so you still have the key in case it gets corrupted or lost. The backup that is encrypted with that key won't help you with that, of course.

  Remote repositories

Borg can initialize and access repositories on remote hosts if the host is accessible using SSH. This is fastest and easiest when Borg is installed on the remote host, in which case the following syntax is used:

$ borg init user@hostname:/mnt/backup

or:

$ borg init ssh://user@hostname:port//mnt/backup

Remote operations over SSH can be automated with SSH keys. You can restrict the use of the SSH keypair by prepending a forced command to the SSH public key in the remote server's authorized_keys file. Only the forced command will be run when the key authenticates a connection. This example will start Borg in server mode, and limit the Borg server to a specific filesystem path:

command="borg serve --restrict-to-path /mnt/backup" ssh-rsa AAAAB3[...]

If it is not possible to install Borg on the remote host, it is still possible to use the remote host to store a repository by mounting the remote filesystem, for example, using sshfs:

$ sshfs user@hostname:/mnt /mnt
$ borg init /mnt/backup
$ fusermount -u /mnt

  Usage

Borg consists of a number of commands. Each command accepts a number of arguments and options. The following sections will describe each command in detail.

  General

  Type of log output

The log level of the builtin logging configuration defaults to WARNING. This is because we want Borg to be mostly silent and only output warnings (plus errors and critical messages).

Use --verbose or --info to set INFO (you will get informative output then additionally to warnings, errors, critical messages). Use --debug to set DEBUG to get output made for debugging.

All log messages created with at least the set level will be output.

Log levels: DEBUG < INFO < WARNING < ERROR < CRITICAL

While you can set misc. log levels, do not expect that every command will give different output on different log levels - it's just a possibility.

  Return codes

Borg can exit with the following return codes (rc):

0 = success (logged as INFO)
1 = warning (operation reached its normal end, but there were warnings -
    you should check the log, logged as WARNING)
2 = error (like a fatal error, a local or remote exception, the operation
    did not reach its normal end, logged as ERROR)
128+N = killed by signal N (e.g. 137 == kill -9)

The return code is also logged at the indicated level as the last log entry.

  Environment Variables

Borg uses some environment variables for automation:

General:

BORG_REPO
    When set, use the value to give the default repository location. If a command needs an archive parameter, you can abbreviate as ::archive. If a command needs a repository parameter, you can either leave it away or abbreviate as ::, if a positional parameter is required.

BORG_PASSPHRASE
    When set, use the value to answer the passphrase question for encrypted repositories.

BORG_LOGGING_CONF
    When set, use the given filename as INI-style logging configuration.

BORG_RSH
    When set, use this command instead of ssh.

TMPDIR
    where temporary files are stored (might need a lot of temporary space for some operations)

Some yes sayers (if set, they automatically confirm that you really want to do X even if there is that warning):

BORG_UNKNOWN_UNENCRYPTED_REPO_ACCESS_IS_OK
    For "Warning: Attempting to access a previously unknown unencrypted repository"

BORG_RELOCATED_REPO_ACCESS_IS_OK
    For "Warning: The repository at location ... was previously located at ..."

BORG_CHECK_I_KNOW_WHAT_I_AM_DOING
    For "Warning: 'check --repair' is an experimental feature that might result in data loss."

Directories:

BORG_KEYS_DIR
    Default to '~/.borg/keys'. This directory contains keys for encrypted repositories.

BORG_CACHE_DIR
    Default to '~/.cache/borg'. This directory contains the local cache and might need a lot of space for dealing with big repositories).

Building:

BORG_OPENSSL_PREFIX
    Adds given OpenSSL header file directory to the default locations (setup.py).

BORG_LZ4_PREFIX
    Adds given LZ4 header file directory to the default locations (setup.py).

    Please note:

•   be very careful when using the "yes" sayers, the warnings with prompt exist for your / your data's security/safety

•   also be very careful when putting your passphrase into a script, make sure it has appropriate file permissions (e.g. mode 600, root:root).

  Resource Usage

Borg might use a lot of resources depending on the size of the data set it is dealing with.

CPU:
    It won't go beyond 100% of 1 core as the code is currently single-threaded. Especially higher zlib and lzma compression levels use significant amounts of CPU cycles.

Memory (RAM):
    The chunks index and the files index are read into memory for performance reasons. Compression, esp. lzma compression with high levels might need substantial amounts of memory.

Temporary files:
    Reading data and metadata from a FUSE mounted repository will consume about the same space as the deduplicated chunks used to represent them in the repository.

Cache files:
    Contains the chunks index and files index (plus a compressed collection of single-archive chunk indexes).

Chunks index:
    Proportional to the amount of data chunks in your repo. Lots of small chunks in your repo imply a big chunks index. You may need to tweak the chunker params (see create options) if you have a lot of data and you want to keep the chunks index at some reasonable size.

Files index:
    Proportional to the amount of files in your last backup. Can be switched off (see create options), but next backup will be much slower if you do.

Network:
    If your repository is remote, all deduplicated (and optionally compressed/ encrypted) data of course has to go over the connection (ssh: repo url). If you use a locally mounted network filesystem, additionally some copy operations used for transaction support also go over the connection. If you backup multiple sources to one target repository, additional traffic happens for cache resynchronization.

    In case you are interested in more details, please read the internals documentation.

  Units

To display quantities, Borg takes care of respecting the usual conventions of scale. Disk sizes are displayed in decimal, using powers of ten (so kB means 1000 bytes). For memory usage, binary prefixes are used, and are indicated using the IEC binary prefixes, using powers of two (so KiB means 1024 bytes).

  Date and Time

We format date and time conforming to ISO-8601, that is: YYYY-MM-DD and HH:MM:SS

For more information, see: https://xkcd.com/1179/

  borg init

usage: borg init [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                 [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH]
                 [-e {none,keyfile,repokey,passphrase}]
                 [REPOSITORY]
Initialize an empty repository
positional arguments:
  REPOSITORY            repository to create
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")
  -e {none,keyfile,repokey,passphrase}, --encryption {none,keyfile,repokey,passphrase}
                        select encryption key mode

  Description

This command initializes an empty repository. A repository is a filesystem directory containing the deduplicated data from zero or more archives. Encryption can be enabled at repository init time. Please note that the 'passphrase' encryption mode is DEPRECATED (instead of it, consider using 'repokey').

  Examples

# Local repository
$ borg init /mnt/backup
# Remote repository (accesses a remote borg via ssh)
$ borg init user@hostname:backup
# Encrypted remote repository, store the key in the repo
$ borg init --encryption=repokey user@hostname:backup
# Encrypted remote repository, store the key your home dir
$ borg init --encryption=keyfile user@hostname:backup

Important notes about encryption:

Use encryption! Repository encryption protects you e.g. against the case that an attacker has access to your backup repository.

But be careful with the key / the passphrase:

--encryption=passphrase is DEPRECATED and will be removed in next major release. This mode has very fundamental, unfixable problems (like you can never change your passphrase or the pbkdf2 iteration count for an existing repository, because the encryption / decryption key is directly derived from the passphrase).

If you want "passphrase-only" security, just use the repokey mode. The key will be stored inside the repository (in its "config" file). In above mentioned attack scenario, the attacker will have the key (but not the passphrase).

If you want "passphrase and having-the-key" security, use the keyfile mode. The key will be stored in your home directory (in .borg/keys). In the attack scenario, the attacker who has just access to your repo won't have the key (and also not the passphrase).

Make a backup copy of the key file (keyfile mode) or repo config file (repokey mode) and keep it at a safe place, so you still have the key in case it gets corrupted or lost. The backup that is encrypted with that key won't help you with that, of course.

Make sure you use a good passphrase. Not too short, not too simple. The real encryption / decryption key is encrypted with / locked by your passphrase. If an attacker gets your key, he can't unlock and use it without knowing the passphrase. In repokey and keyfile modes, you can change your passphrase for existing repos.

  borg create

usage: borg create [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                   [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH] [-s]
                   [-p] [--filter STATUSCHARS] [-e PATTERN]
                   [--exclude-from EXCLUDEFILE] [--exclude-caches]
                   [--exclude-if-present FILENAME] [--keep-tag-files]
                   [-c SECONDS] [-x] [--numeric-owner]
                   [--timestamp yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss]
                   [--chunker-params CHUNK_MIN_EXP,CHUNK_MAX_EXP,HASH_MASK_BITS,HASH_WINDOW_SIZE]
                   [-C COMPRESSION] [--read-special] [-n]
                   ARCHIVE PATH [PATH ...]
Create new archive
positional arguments:
  ARCHIVE               name of archive to create (must be also a valid
                        directory name)
  PATH                  paths to archive
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")
  -s, --stats           print statistics for the created archive
  -p, --progress        show progress display while creating the archive,
                        showing Original, Compressed and Deduplicated sizes,
                        followed by the Number of files seen and the path
                        being processed, default: False
  --filter STATUSCHARS  only display items with the given status characters
  -e PATTERN, --exclude PATTERN
                        exclude paths matching PATTERN
  --exclude-from EXCLUDEFILE
                        read exclude patterns from EXCLUDEFILE, one per line
  --exclude-caches      exclude directories that contain a CACHEDIR.TAG file
                        (http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/spec.html)
  --exclude-if-present FILENAME
                        exclude directories that contain the specified file
  --keep-tag-files      keep tag files of excluded caches/directories
  -c SECONDS, --checkpoint-interval SECONDS
                        write checkpoint every SECONDS seconds (Default: 300)
  -x, --one-file-system
                        stay in same file system, do not cross mount points
  --numeric-owner       only store numeric user and group identifiers
  --timestamp yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss
                        manually specify the archive creation date/time (UTC).
                        alternatively, give a reference file/directory.
  --chunker-params CHUNK_MIN_EXP,CHUNK_MAX_EXP,HASH_MASK_BITS,HASH_WINDOW_SIZE
                        specify the chunker parameters. default: 10,23,16,4095
  -C COMPRESSION, --compression COMPRESSION
                        select compression algorithm (and level): none == no
                        compression (default), lz4 == lz4, zlib == zlib
                        (default level 6), zlib,0 .. zlib,9 == zlib (with
                        level 0..9), lzma == lzma (default level 6), lzma,0 ..
                        lzma,9 == lzma (with level 0..9).
  --read-special        open and read special files as if they were regular
                        files
  -n, --dry-run         do not create a backup archive

  Description

This command creates a backup archive containing all files found while recursively traversing all paths specified. The archive will consume almost no disk space for files or parts of files that have already been stored in other archives.

See the output of the "borg help patterns" command for more help on exclude patterns.

  Examples

# Backup ~/Documents into an archive named "my-documents"
$ borg create /mnt/backup::my-documents ~/Documents
# Backup ~/Documents and ~/src but exclude pyc files
$ borg create /mnt/backup::my-files   \
    ~/Documents                       \
    ~/src                             \
    --exclude '*.pyc'
# Backup the root filesystem into an archive named "root-YYYY-MM-DD"
# use zlib compression (good, but slow) - default is no compression
NAME="root-`date +%Y-%m-%d`"
$ borg create -C zlib,6 /mnt/backup::$NAME / --do-not-cross-mountpoints
# Backup huge files with little chunk management overhead
$ borg create --chunker-params 19,23,21,4095 /mnt/backup::VMs /srv/VMs
# Backup a raw device (must not be active/in use/mounted at that time)
$ dd if=/dev/sda bs=10M | borg create /mnt/backup::my-sda -
# No compression (default)
$ borg create /mnt/backup::repo ~
# Super fast, low compression
$ borg create --compression lz4 /mnt/backup::repo ~
# Less fast, higher compression (N = 0..9)
$ borg create --compression zlib,N /mnt/backup::repo ~
# Even slower, even higher compression (N = 0..9)
$ borg create --compression lzma,N /mnt/backup::repo ~

  borg extract

usage: borg extract [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                    [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH] [-n]
                    [-e PATTERN] [--exclude-from EXCLUDEFILE]
                    [--numeric-owner] [--strip-components NUMBER] [--stdout]
                    [--sparse]
                    ARCHIVE [PATH [PATH ...]]
Extract archive contents
positional arguments:
  ARCHIVE               archive to extract
  PATH                  paths to extract
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")
  -n, --dry-run         do not actually change any files
  -e PATTERN, --exclude PATTERN
                        exclude paths matching PATTERN
  --exclude-from EXCLUDEFILE
                        read exclude patterns from EXCLUDEFILE, one per line
  --numeric-owner       only obey numeric user and group identifiers
  --strip-components NUMBER
                        Remove the specified number of leading path elements.
                        Pathnames with fewer elements will be silently
                        skipped.
  --stdout              write all extracted data to stdout
  --sparse              create holes in output sparse file from all-zero
                        chunks

  Description

This command extracts the contents of an archive. By default the entire archive is extracted but a subset of files and directories can be selected by passing a list of PATHs as arguments. The file selection can further be restricted by using the --exclude option.

See the output of the "borg help patterns" command for more help on exclude patterns.

  Examples

# Extract entire archive
$ borg extract /mnt/backup::my-files
# Extract entire archive and list files while processing
$ borg extract -v /mnt/backup::my-files
# Extract the "src" directory
$ borg extract /mnt/backup::my-files home/USERNAME/src
# Extract the "src" directory but exclude object files
$ borg extract /mnt/backup::my-files home/USERNAME/src --exclude '*.o'

Note: currently, extract always writes into the current working directory ("."),
    so make sure you cd to the right place before calling borg extract.

  borg check

usage: borg check [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                  [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH]
                  [--repository-only] [--archives-only] [--repair]
                  [--save-space] [--last N] [-p PREFIX]
                  [REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE]
Check repository consistency
positional arguments:
  REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE
                        repository or archive to check consistency of
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")
  --repository-only     only perform repository checks
  --archives-only       only perform archives checks
  --repair              attempt to repair any inconsistencies found
  --save-space          work slower, but using less space
  --last N              only check last N archives (Default: all)
  -p PREFIX, --prefix PREFIX
                        only consider archive names starting with this prefix

  Description

The check command verifies the consistency of a repository and the corresponding archives.

First, the underlying repository data files are checked:

•   For all segments the segment magic (header) is checked

•   For all objects stored in the segments, all metadata (e.g. crc and size) and all data is read. The read data is checked by size and CRC. Bit rot and other types of accidental damage can be detected this way.

•   If we are in repair mode and a integrity error is detected for a segment, we try to recover as many objects from the segment as possible.

•   In repair mode, it makes sure that the index is consistent with the data stored in the segments.

•   If you use a remote repo server via ssh:, the repo check is executed on the repo server without causing significant network traffic.

•   The repository check can be skipped using the --archives-only option.

    Second, the consistency and correctness of the archive metadata is verified:

•   Is the repo manifest present? If not, it is rebuilt from archive metadata chunks (this requires reading and decrypting of all metadata and data).

•   Check if archive metadata chunk is present. if not, remove archive from manifest.

•   For all files (items) in the archive, for all chunks referenced by these files, check if chunk is present (if not and we are in repair mode, replace it with a same-size chunk of zeros). This requires reading of archive and file metadata, but not data.

•   If we are in repair mode and we checked all the archives: delete orphaned chunks from the repo.

•   if you use a remote repo server via ssh:, the archive check is executed on the client machine (because if encryption is enabled, the checks will require decryption and this is always done client-side, because key access will be required).

•   The archive checks can be time consuming, they can be skipped using the --repository-only option.

  borg rename

usage: borg rename [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                   [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH]
                   ARCHIVE NEWNAME
Rename an existing archive
positional arguments:
  ARCHIVE               archive to rename
  NEWNAME               the new archive name to use
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")

  Description

This command renames an archive in the repository.

  Examples

$ borg create /mnt/backup::archivename ~
$ borg list /mnt/backup
archivename                          Mon Nov  2 20:40:06 2015
$ borg rename /mnt/backup::archivename newname
$ borg list /mnt/backup
newname                              Mon Nov  2 20:40:06 2015

  borg delete

usage: borg delete [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                   [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH] [-s]
                   [-c] [--save-space]
                   [TARGET]
Delete an existing repository or archive
positional arguments:
  TARGET                archive or repository to delete
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")
  -s, --stats           print statistics for the deleted archive
  -c, --cache-only      delete only the local cache for the given repository
  --save-space          work slower, but using less space

  Description

This command deletes an archive from the repository or the complete repository. Disk space is reclaimed accordingly. If you delete the complete repository, the local cache for it (if any) is also deleted.

  borg list

usage: borg list [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                 [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH] [--short]
                 [-p PREFIX]
                 [REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE]
List archive or repository contents
positional arguments:
  REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE
                        repository/archive to list contents of
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")
  --short               only print file/directory names, nothing else
  -p PREFIX, --prefix PREFIX
                        only consider archive names starting with this prefix

  Description

This command lists the contents of a repository or an archive.

  Examples

$ borg list /mnt/backup
my-files            Thu Aug  1 23:33:22 2013
my-documents        Thu Aug  1 23:35:43 2013
root-2013-08-01     Thu Aug  1 23:43:55 2013
root-2013-08-02     Fri Aug  2 15:18:17 2013
...
$ borg list /mnt/backup::root-2013-08-02
drwxr-xr-x root   root          0 Jun 05 12:06 .
lrwxrwxrwx root   root          0 May 31 20:40 bin -> usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x root   root          0 Aug 01 22:08 etc
drwxr-xr-x root   root          0 Jul 15 22:07 etc/ImageMagick-6
-rw-r--r-- root   root       1383 May 22 22:25 etc/ImageMagick-6/colors.xml
...

  borg prune

usage: borg prune [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                  [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH] [-n]
                  [-s] [--keep-within WITHIN] [-H HOURLY] [-d DAILY]
                  [-w WEEKLY] [-m MONTHLY] [-y YEARLY] [-p PREFIX]
                  [--save-space]
                  [REPOSITORY]
Prune repository archives according to specified rules
positional arguments:
  REPOSITORY            repository to prune
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")
  -n, --dry-run         do not change repository
  -s, --stats           print statistics for the deleted archive
  --keep-within WITHIN  keep all archives within this time interval
  -H HOURLY, --keep-hourly HOURLY
                        number of hourly archives to keep
  -d DAILY, --keep-daily DAILY
                        number of daily archives to keep
  -w WEEKLY, --keep-weekly WEEKLY
                        number of weekly archives to keep
  -m MONTHLY, --keep-monthly MONTHLY
                        number of monthly archives to keep
  -y YEARLY, --keep-yearly YEARLY
                        number of yearly archives to keep
  -p PREFIX, --prefix PREFIX
                        only consider archive names starting with this prefix
  --save-space          work slower, but using less space

  Description

The prune command prunes a repository by deleting archives not matching any of the specified retention options. This command is normally used by automated backup scripts wanting to keep a certain number of historic backups.

As an example, "-d 7" means to keep the latest backup on each day for 7 days. Days without backups do not count towards the total. The rules are applied from hourly to yearly, and backups selected by previous rules do not count towards those of later rules. The time that each backup completes is used for pruning purposes. Dates and times are interpreted in the local timezone, and weeks go from Monday to Sunday. Specifying a negative number of archives to keep means that there is no limit.

The "--keep-within" option takes an argument of the form "<int><char>", where char is "H", "d", "w", "m", "y". For example, "--keep-within 2d" means to keep all archives that were created within the past 48 hours. "1m" is taken to mean "31d". The archives kept with this option do not count towards the totals specified by any other options.

If a prefix is set with -p, then only archives that start with the prefix are considered for deletion and only those archives count towards the totals specified by the rules. Otherwise, all archives in the repository are candidates for deletion!

  Examples

Be careful, prune is potentially dangerous command, it will remove backup archives.

The default of prune is to apply to all archives in the repository unless you restrict its operation to a subset of the archives using --prefix. When using --prefix, be careful to choose a good prefix - e.g. do not use a prefix "foo" if you do not also want to match "foobar".

It is strongly recommended to always run prune --dry-run ... first so you will see what it would do without it actually doing anything.

# Keep 7 end of day and 4 additional end of week archives.
# Do a dry-run without actually deleting anything.
$ borg prune /mnt/backup --dry-run --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4
# Same as above but only apply to archive names starting with "foo":
$ borg prune /mnt/backup --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --prefix=foo
# Keep 7 end of day, 4 additional end of week archives,
# and an end of month archive for every month:
$ borg prune /mnt/backup --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=-1
# Keep all backups in the last 10 days, 4 additional end of week archives,
# and an end of month archive for every month:
$ borg prune /mnt/backup --keep-within=10d --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=-1

  borg info

usage: borg info [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                 [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH]
                 ARCHIVE
Show archive details such as disk space used
positional arguments:
  ARCHIVE               archive to display information about
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")

  Description

This command displays some detailed information about the specified archive.

  Examples

$ borg info /mnt/backup::root-2013-08-02
Name: root-2013-08-02
Fingerprint: bc3902e2c79b6d25f5d769b335c5c49331e6537f324d8d3badcb9a0917536dbb
Hostname: myhostname
Username: root
Time: Fri Aug  2 15:18:17 2013
Command line: /usr/bin/borg create --stats -C zlib,6 /mnt/backup::root-2013-08-02 / --do-not-cross-mountpoints
Number of files: 147429
Original size: 5344169493 (4.98 GB)
Compressed size: 1748189642 (1.63 GB)
Unique data: 64805454 (61.80 MB)

  borg mount

usage: borg mount [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                  [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH] [-f]
                  [-o OPTIONS]
                  REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE MOUNTPOINT
Mount archive or an entire repository as a FUSE fileystem
positional arguments:
  REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE
                        repository/archive to mount
  MOUNTPOINT            where to mount filesystem
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")
  -f, --foreground      stay in foreground, do not daemonize
  -o OPTIONS            Extra mount options

  Description

This command mounts an archive as a FUSE filesystem. This can be useful for browsing an archive or restoring individual files. Unless the --foreground option is given the command will run in the background until the filesystem is umounted.

  Examples

$ borg mount /mnt/backup::root-2013-08-02 /tmp/mymountpoint
$ ls /tmp/mymountpoint
bin  boot  etc  lib  lib64  mnt  opt  root  sbin  srv  usr  var
$ fusermount -u /tmp/mymountpoint

  borg change-passphrase

usage: borg change-passphrase [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                              [--no-files-cache] [--umask M]
                              [--remote-path PATH]
                              [REPOSITORY]
Change repository key file passphrase
positional arguments:
  REPOSITORY
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")

  Description

The key files used for repository encryption are optionally passphrase protected. This command can be used to change this passphrase.

  Examples

# Create a key file protected repository
$ borg init --encryption=keyfile /mnt/backup
Initializing repository at "/mnt/backup"
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Key file "/home/USER/.borg/keys/mnt_backup" created.
Keep this file safe. Your data will be inaccessible without it.
# Change key file passphrase
$ borg change-passphrase /mnt/backup
Enter passphrase for key file /home/USER/.borg/keys/mnt_backup:
New passphrase:
Enter same passphrase again:
Key file "/home/USER/.borg/keys/mnt_backup" updated

  borg serve

usage: borg serve [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                  [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH]
                  [--restrict-to-path PATH]
Start in server mode. This command is usually not used manually.
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")
  --restrict-to-path PATH
                        restrict repository access to PATH

  Description

This command starts a repository server process. This command is usually not used manually.

  Examples

# Allow an SSH keypair to only run |project_name|, and only have access to /mnt/backup.
# This will help to secure an automated remote backup system.
$ cat ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
command="borg serve --restrict-to-path /mnt/backup" ssh-rsa AAAAB3[...]

  borg upgrade

usage: borg upgrade [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--lock-wait N] [--show-rc]
                    [--no-files-cache] [--umask M] [--remote-path PATH] [-n]
                    [-i]
                    [REPOSITORY]
upgrade a repository from a previous version
positional arguments:
  REPOSITORY            path to the repository to be upgraded
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose, --info
                        enable informative (verbose) output, work on log level
                        INFO
  --debug               enable debug output, work on log level DEBUG
  --lock-wait N         wait for the lock, but max. N seconds (default: 1).
  --show-rc             show/log the return code (rc)
  --no-files-cache      do not load/update the file metadata cache used to
                        detect unchanged files
  --umask M             set umask to M (local and remote, default: 0077)
  --remote-path PATH    set remote path to executable (default: "borg")
  -n, --dry-run         do not change repository
  -i, --inplace         rewrite repository in place, with no chance of going
                        back to older versions of the repository.

  Description

upgrade an existing Borg repository. this currently only support converting an Attic repository, but may eventually be extended to cover major Borg upgrades as well.

it will change the magic strings in the repository's segments to match the new Borg magic strings. the keyfiles found in $ATTIC_KEYS_DIR or ~/.attic/keys/ will also be converted and copied to $BORG_KEYS_DIR or ~/.borg/keys.

the cache files are converted, from $ATTIC_CACHE_DIR or ~/.cache/attic to $BORG_CACHE_DIR or ~/.cache/borg, but the cache layout between Borg and Attic changed, so it is possible the first backup after the conversion takes longer than expected due to the cache resync.

upgrade should be able to resume if interrupted, although it will still iterate over all segments. if you want to start from scratch, use borg delete over the copied repository to make sure the cache files are also removed: borg delete borg

unless --inplace is specified, the upgrade process first creates a backup copy of the repository, in REPOSITORY.upgrade-DATETIME, using hardlinks. this takes longer than in place upgrades, but is much safer and gives progress information (as opposed to cp -al). once you are satisfied with the conversion, you can safely destroy the backup copy.

WARNING: running the upgrade in place will make the current copy unusable with older version, with no way of going back to previous versions. this can PERMANENTLY DAMAGE YOUR REPOSITORY! Attic CAN NOT READ BORG REPOSITORIES, as the magic strings have changed. you have been warned.

  Examples

borg upgrade -v /mnt/backup

  Miscellaneous Help

  borg help patterns

Exclude patterns use a variant of shell pattern syntax, with '*' matching any
number of characters, '?' matching any single character, '[...]' matching any
single character specified, including ranges, and '[!...]' matching any
character not specified.  For the purpose of these patterns, the path
separator ('\' for Windows and '/' on other systems) is not treated
specially.  For a path to match a pattern, it must completely match from
start to end, or must match from the start to just before a path separator.
Except for the root path, paths will never end in the path separator when
matching is attempted.  Thus, if a given pattern ends in a path separator, a
'*' is appended before matching is attempted.  Patterns with wildcards should
be quoted to protect them from shell expansion.
Examples:
# Exclude '/home/user/file.o' but not '/home/user/file.odt':
$ borg create -e '*.o' backup /
# Exclude '/home/user/junk' and '/home/user/subdir/junk' but
# not '/home/user/importantjunk' or '/etc/junk':
$ borg create -e '/home/*/junk' backup /
# Exclude the contents of '/home/user/cache' but not the directory itself:
$ borg create -e /home/user/cache/ backup /
# The file '/home/user/cache/important' is *not* backed up:
$ borg create -e /home/user/cache/ backup / /home/user/cache/important

  Debug Commands

There are some more commands (all starting with "debug-") wich are are all not intended for normal use and potentially very dangerous if used incorrectly.

They exist to improve debugging capabilities without direct system access, e.g. in case you ever run into some severe malfunction. Use them only if you know what you are doing or if a trusted Borg developer tells you what to do.

  Additional Notes

Here are misc. notes about topics that are maybe not covered in enough detail in the usage section.

  Item flags

borg create -v outputs a verbose list of all files, directories and other file system items it considered (no matter whether they had content changes or not). For each item, it prefixes a single-letter flag that indicates type and/or status of the item.

If you are interested only in a subset of that output, you can give e.g. --filter=AME and it will only show regular files with A, M or E status (see below).

A uppercase character represents the status of a regular file relative to the "files" cache (not relative to the repo - this is an issue if the files cache is not used). Metadata is stored in any case and for 'A' and 'M' also new data chunks are stored. For 'U' all data chunks refer to already existing chunks.

•   'A' = regular file, added (see also a_status_oddity in the FAQ)

•   'M' = regular file, modified

•   'U' = regular file, unchanged

•   'E' = regular file, an error happened while accessing/reading this file

    A lowercase character means a file type other than a regular file, borg usually just stores their metadata:

•   'd' = directory

•   'b' = block device

•   'c' = char device

•   'h' = regular file, hardlink (to already seen inodes)

•   's' = symlink

•   'f' = fifo

    Other flags used include:

•   'i' = backup data was read from standard input (stdin)

•   '-' = dry run, item was not backed up

•   '?' = missing status code (if you see this, please file a bug report!)

  --chunker-params

The chunker params influence how input files are cut into pieces (chunks) which are then considered for deduplication. They also have a big impact on resource usage (RAM and disk space) as the amount of resources needed is (also) determined by the total amount of chunks in the repository (see Indexes / Caches memory usage for details).

--chunker-params=10,23,16,4095 (default) results in a fine-grained deduplication and creates a big amount of chunks and thus uses a lot of resources to manage them. This is good for relatively small data volumes and if the machine has a good amount of free RAM and disk space.

--chunker-params=19,23,21,4095 results in a coarse-grained deduplication and creates a much smaller amount of chunks and thus uses less resources. This is good for relatively big data volumes and if the machine has a relatively low amount of free RAM and disk space.

If you already have made some archives in a repository and you then change chunker params, this of course impacts deduplication as the chunks will be cut differently.

In the worst case (all files are big and were touched in between backups), this will store all content into the repository again.

Usually, it is not that bad though: - usually most files are not touched, so it will just re-use the old chunks it already has in the repo - files smaller than the (both old and new) minimum chunksize result in only one chunk anyway, so the resulting chunks are same and deduplication will apply

If you switch chunker params to save resources for an existing repo that already has some backup archives, you will see an increasing effect over time, when more and more files have been touched and stored again using the bigger chunksize and all references to the smaller older chunks have been removed (by deleting / pruning archives).

If you want to see an immediate big effect on resource usage, you better start a new repository when changing chunker params.

For more details, see chunker_details.

  --read-special

The option --read-special is not intended for normal, filesystem-level (full or partly-recursive) backups. You only give this option if you want to do something rather ... special -- and if you have hand-picked some files that you want to treat that way.

borg create --read-special will open all files without doing any special treatment according to the file type (the only exception here are directories: they will be recursed into). Just imagine what happens if you do cat filename --- the content you will see there is what borg will backup for that filename.

So, for example, symlinks will be followed, block device content will be read, named pipes / UNIX domain sockets will be read.

You need to be careful with what you give as filename when using --read-special, e.g. if you give /dev/zero, your backup will never terminate.

The given files' metadata is saved as it would be saved without --read-special (e.g. its name, its size [might be 0], its mode, etc.) - but additionally, also the content read from it will be saved for it.

Restoring such files' content is currently only supported one at a time via --stdout option (and you have to redirect stdout to where ever it shall go, maybe directly into an existing device file of your choice or indirectly via dd).

  Example

Imagine you have made some snapshots of logical volumes (LVs) you want to backup.

NOTE: For some scenarios, this is a good method to get "crash-like" consistency (I call it crash-like because it is the same as you would get if you just hit the reset button or your machine would abrubtly and completely crash). This is better than no consistency at all and a good method for some use cases, but likely not good enough if you have databases running.

Then you create a backup archive of all these snapshots. The backup process will see a "frozen" state of the logical volumes, while the processes working in the original volumes continue changing the data stored there.

You also add the output of lvdisplay to your backup, so you can see the LV sizes in case you ever need to recreate and restore them.

After the backup has completed, you remove the snapshots again.

$ # create snapshots here
$ lvdisplay > lvdisplay.txt
$ borg create --read-special /mnt/backup::repo lvdisplay.txt /dev/vg0/*-snapshot
$ # remove snapshots here

Now, let's see how to restore some LVs from such a backup.

$ borg extract /mnt/backup::repo lvdisplay.txt
$ # create empty LVs with correct sizes here (look into lvdisplay.txt).
$ # we assume that you created an empty root and home LV and overwrite it now:
$ borg extract --stdout /mnt/backup::repo dev/vg0/root-snapshot > /dev/vg0/root
$ borg extract --stdout /mnt/backup::repo dev/vg0/home-snapshot > /dev/vg0/home

  Frequently asked questions

  Can I backup VM disk images?

Yes, the deduplication technique used by Borg makes sure only the modified parts of the file are stored. Also, we have optional simple sparse file support for extract.

  Can I backup from multiple servers into a single repository?

Yes, but in order for the deduplication used by Borg to work, it needs to keep a local cache containing checksums of all file chunks already stored in the repository. This cache is stored in ~/.cache/borg/. If Borg detects that a repository has been modified since the local cache was updated it will need to rebuild the cache. This rebuild can be quite time consuming.

So, yes it's possible. But it will be most efficient if a single repository is only modified from one place. Also keep in mind that Borg will keep an exclusive lock on the repository while creating or deleting archives, which may make simultaneous backups fail.

  Which file types, attributes, etc. are preserved?

•   Directories

•   Regular files

•   Hardlinks (considering all files in the same archive)

•   Symlinks (stored as symlink, the symlink is not followed)

•   Character and block device files

•   FIFOs ("named pipes")

•   Name

•   Contents

•   Time of last modification (nanosecond precision with Python >= 3.3)

•   User ID of owner

•   Group ID of owner

•   Unix Mode/Permissions (u/g/o permissions, suid, sgid, sticky)

•   Extended Attributes (xattrs) on Linux, OS X and FreeBSD

•   Access Control Lists (ACL) on Linux, OS X and FreeBSD

•   BSD flags on OS X and FreeBSD

  Which file types, attributes, etc. are not preserved?

•   UNIX domain sockets (because it does not make sense - they are meaningless without the running process that created them and the process needs to recreate them in any case). So, don't panic if your backup misses a UDS!

•   The precise on-disk representation of the holes in a sparse file. Archive creation has no special support for sparse files, holes are backed up as (deduplicated and compressed) runs of zero bytes. Archive extraction has optional support to extract all-zero chunks as holes in a sparse file.

  Why is my backup bigger than with attic? Why doesn't Borg do compression by default?

Attic was rather unflexible when it comes to compression, it always compressed using zlib level 6 (no way to switch compression off or adjust the level or algorithm).

Borg offers a lot of different compression algorithms and levels. Which of them is the best for you pretty much depends on your use case, your data, your hardware - so you need to do an informed decision about whether you want to use compression, which algorithm and which level you want to use. This is why compression defaults to none.

  How can I specify the encryption passphrase programmatically?

The encryption passphrase can be specified programmatically using the BORG_PASSPHRASE environment variable. This is convenient when setting up automated encrypted backups. Another option is to use key file based encryption with a blank passphrase. See encrypted_repos for more details.

NOTE: Be careful how you set the environment; using the env command, a system() call or using inline shell scripts might expose the credentials in the process list directly and they will be readable to all users on a system. Using export in a shell script file should be safe, however, as the environment of a process is accessible only to that user.

  When backing up to remote encrypted repos, is encryption done locally?

Yes, file and directory metadata and data is locally encrypted, before leaving the local machine. We do not mean the transport layer encryption by that, but the data/metadata itself. Transport layer encryption (e.g. when ssh is used as a transport) applies additionally.

  When backing up to remote servers, do I have to trust the remote server?

Yes and No.

No, as far as data confidentiality is concerned - if you use encryption, all your files/dirs data and metadata are stored in their encrypted form into the repository.

Yes, as an attacker with access to the remote server could delete (or otherwise make unavailable) all your backups.

  If a backup stops mid-way, does the already-backed-up data stay there?

Yes, Borg supports resuming backups.

During a backup a special checkpoint archive named <archive-name>.checkpoint is saved every checkpoint interval (the default value for this is 5 minutes) containing all the data backed-up until that point. This means that at most <checkpoint interval> worth of data needs to be retransmitted if a backup needs to be restarted.

Once your backup has finished successfully, you can delete all *.checkpoint archives.

  If it crashes with a UnicodeError, what can I do?

Check if your encoding is set correctly. For most POSIX-like systems, try:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8  # or similar, important is correct charset

  I can't extract non-ascii filenames by giving them on the commandline!?

This might be due to different ways to represent some characters in unicode or due to other non-ascii encoding issues.

If you run into that, try this:

•   avoid the non-ascii characters on the commandline by e.g. extracting the parent directory (or even everything)

•   mount the repo using FUSE and use some file manager

  Can Borg add redundancy to the backup data to deal with hardware malfunction?

No, it can't. While that at first sounds like a good idea to defend against some defect HDD sectors or SSD flash blocks, dealing with this in a reliable way needs a lot of low-level storage layout information and control which we do not have (and also can't get, even if we wanted).

So, if you need that, consider RAID or a filesystem that offers redundant storage or just make backups to different locations / different hardware.

See also ticket 225.

  Can Borg verify data integrity of a backup archive?

Yes, if you want to detect accidental data damage (like bit rot), use the check operation. It will notice corruption using CRCs and hashes. If you want to be able to detect malicious tampering also, use a encrypted repo. It will then be able to check using CRCs and HMACs.

  I am seeing 'A' (added) status for a unchanged file!?

The files cache is used to determine whether Borg already "knows" / has backed up a file and if so, to skip the file from chunking. It does intentionally not contain files that:

•   have >= 10 as "entry age" (Borg has not seen this file for a while)

•   have a modification time (mtime) same as the newest mtime in the created archive

    So, if you see an 'A' status for unchanged file(s), they are likely the files with the most recent mtime in that archive.

    This is expected: it is to avoid data loss with files that are backed up from a snapshot and that are immediately changed after the snapshot (but within mtime granularity time, so the mtime would not change). Without the code that removes these files from the files cache, the change that happened right after the snapshot would not be contained in the next backup as Borg would think the file is unchanged.

    This does not affect deduplication, the file will be chunked, but as the chunks will often be the same and already stored in the repo (except in the above mentioned rare condition), it will just re-use them as usual and not store new data chunks.

    Since only the files cache is used in the display of files status, those files are reported as being added when, really, chunks are already used.

  Why was Borg forked from Attic?

Borg was created in May 2015 in response to the difficulty of getting new code or larger changes incorporated into Attic and establishing a bigger developer community / more open development.

More details can be found in ticket 217 that led to the fork.

Borg intends to be:

•   simple:

•   as simple as possible, but no simpler

•   do the right thing by default, but offer options

•   open:

•   welcome feature requests

•   accept pull requests of good quality and coding style

•   give feedback on PRs that can't be accepted "as is"

•   discuss openly, don't work in the dark

•   changing:

•   Borg is not compatible with Attic

•   do not break compatibility accidentally, without a good reason or without warning. allow compatibility breaking for other cases.

•   if major version number changes, it may have incompatible changes

  Support

Please first read the docs and existing issue tracker issues and mailing list posts, a lot of stuff is already documented / explained / discussed / filed there.

  Issue Tracker

If you've found a bug or have a concrete feature request, please create a new ticket on the project's issue tracker.

For more general questions or discussions, IRC or mailing list are preferred.

  IRC

Join us on channel #borgbackup on chat.freenode.net.

As usual on IRC, just ask or tell directly and then patiently wait for replies. Stay connected.

  Mailing list

New Mailing List:

borgbackup@python.org

Just read that page to find out about the mailing list, its topic, how to subscribe, how to unsubscribe and where you can find the archives of the list.

  Bounties and Fundraisers

We use BountySource to allow monetary contributions to the project and the developers, who push it forward.

There, you can give general funds to the borgbackup members (the developers will then spend the funds as they deem fit). If you do not have some specific bounty (see below), you can use this as a general way to say "Thank You!" and support the software / project you like.

If you want to encourage developers to fix some specific issue or implement some specific feature suggestion, you can post a new bounty or back an existing one (they always refer to an issue in our issue tracker).

As a developer, you can become a Bounty Hunter and win bounties (earn money) by contributing to Borg, a free and open source software project.

We might also use BountySource to fund raise for some bigger goals.

  Resources

This is a collection of additional resources that are somehow related to borgbackup.

  Videos, Talks, Presentations

Some of them refer to attic, but you can do the same stuff (and more) with borgbackup.

•   BorgBackup Installation and Basic Usage (english screencast)

•   TW's slides for borgbackup talks / lightning talks (just grab the latest ones)

•   "Attic / Borg Backup" talk from GPN 2015 (video, german audio, english slides): media.ccc.de or youtube

•   "Attic" talk from Easterhegg 2015 (video, german audio, english slides): media.ccc.de or youtube

•   "Attic Backup: Mount your encrypted backups over ssh", 2014 (video, english): youtube

  Software

•   BorgWeb - a very simple web UI for BorgBackup

•   some other stuff found at the BorgBackup Github organisation

•   atticmatic (includes borgmatic)

  Changelog

  Version 0.29.0

Compatibility notes:

•   when upgrading to 0.29.0 you need to upgrade client as well as server installations due to the locking and commandline interface changes otherwise you'll get an error msg about a RPC protocol mismatch or a wrong commandline option. if you run a server that needs to support both old and new clients, it is suggested that you have a "borg-0.28.2" and a "borg-0.29.0" command. clients then can choose via e.g. "borg --remote-path=borg-0.29.0 ...".

•   the default waiting time for a lock changed from infinity to 1 second for a better interactive user experience. if the repo you want to access is currently locked, borg will now terminate after 1s with an error message. if you have scripts that shall wait for the lock for a longer time, use --lock-wait N (with N being the maximum wait time in seconds).

    Bug fixes:

•   hash table tuning (better chosen hashtable load factor 0.75 and prime initial size of 1031 gave ~1000x speedup in some scenarios)

•   avoid creation of an orphan lock for one case, #285

•   --keep-tag-files: fix file mode and multiple tag files in one directory, #432

•   fixes for "borg upgrade" (attic repo converter), #466

•   remove --progress isatty magic (and also --no-progress option) again, #476

•   borg init: display proper repo URL

•   fix format of umask in help pages, #463

    New features:

•   implement --lock-wait, support timeout for UpgradableLock, #210

•   implement borg break-lock command, #157

•   include system info below traceback, #324

•   sane remote logging, remote stderr, #461:

•   remote log output: intercept it and log it via local logging system, with "Remote: " prefixed to message. log remote tracebacks.

•   remote stderr: output it to local stderr with "Remote: " prefixed.

•   add --debug and --info (same as --verbose) to set the log level of the builtin logging configuration (which otherwise defaults to warning), #426 note: there are few messages emitted at DEBUG level currently.

•   optionally configure logging via env var BORG_LOGGING_CONF

•   add --filter option for status characters: e.g. to show only the added or modified files (and also errors), use "borg create -v --filter=AME ...".

•   more progress indicators, #394

•   use ISO-8601 date and time format, #375

•   "borg check --prefix" to restrict archive checking to that name prefix, #206

    Other changes:

•   hashindex_add C implementation (speed up cache re-sync for new archives)

•   increase FUSE read_size to 1024 (speed up metadata operations)

•   check/delete/prune --save-space: free unused segments quickly, #239

•   increase rpc protocol version to 2 (see also Compatibility notes), #458

•   silence borg by default (via default log level WARNING)

•   get rid of C compiler warnings, #391

•   upgrade OS X FUSE to 3.0.9 on the OS X binary build system

•   use python 3.5.1 to build binaries

•   docs:

•   new mailing list borgbackup@python.org, #468

•   readthedocs: color and logo improvements

•   load coverage icons over SSL (avoids mixed content)

•   more precise binary installation steps

•   update release procedure docs about OS X FUSE

•   FAQ entry about unexpected 'A' status for unchanged file(s), #403

•   add docs about 'E' file status

•   add "borg upgrade" docs, #464

•   add developer docs about output and logging

•   clarify encryption, add note about client-side encryption

•   add resources section, with videos, talks, presentations, #149

•   Borg moved to Arch Linux [community]

•   fix wrong installation instructions for archlinux

  Version 0.28.2

New features:

•   borg create --exclude-if-present TAGFILE - exclude directories that have the given file from the backup. You can additionally give --keep-tag-files to preserve just the directory roots and the tag-files (but not backup other directory contents), #395, attic #128, attic #142

    Other changes:

•   do not create docs sources at build time (just have them in the repo), completely remove have_cython() hack, do not use the "mock" library at build time, #384

•   avoid hidden import, make it easier for PyInstaller, easier fix for #218

•   docs:

•   add description of item flags / status output, fixes #402

•   explain how to regenerate usage and API files (build_api or build_usage) and when to commit usage files directly into git, #384

•   minor install docs improvements

  Version 0.28.1

Bug fixes:

•   do not try to build api / usage docs for production install, fixes unexpected "mock" build dependency, #384

    Other changes:

•   avoid using msgpack.packb at import time

•   fix formatting issue in changes.rst

•   fix build on readthedocs

  Version 0.28.0

Compatibility notes:

•   changed return codes (exit codes), see docs. in short: old: 0 = ok, 1 = error. now: 0 = ok, 1 = warning, 2 = error

    New features:

•   refactor return codes (exit codes), fixes #61

•   add --show-rc option enable "terminating with X status, rc N" output, fixes 58, #351

•   borg create backups atime and ctime additionally to mtime, fixes #317 - extract: support atime additionally to mtime - FUSE: support ctime and atime additionally to mtime

•   support borg --version

•   emit a warning if we have a slow msgpack installed

•   borg list --prefix=thishostname- REPO, fixes #205

•   Debug commands (do not use except if you know what you do: debug-get-obj, debug-put-obj, debug-delete-obj, debug-dump-archive-items.

    Bug fixes:

•   setup.py: fix bug related to BORG_LZ4_PREFIX processing

•   fix "check" for repos that have incomplete chunks, fixes #364

•   borg mount: fix unlocking of repository at umount time, fixes #331

•   fix reading files without touching their atime, #334

•   non-ascii ACL fixes for Linux, FreeBSD and OS X, #277

•   fix acl_use_local_uid_gid() and add a test for it, attic #359

•   borg upgrade: do not upgrade repositories in place by default, #299

•   fix cascading failure with the index conversion code, #269

•   borg check: implement 'cmdline' archive metadata value decoding, #311

•   fix RobustUnpacker, it missed some metadata keys (new atime and ctime keys were missing, but also bsdflags). add check for unknown metadata keys.

•   create from stdin: also save atime, ctime (cosmetic)

•   use default_notty=False for confirmations, fixes #345

•   vagrant: fix msgpack installation on centos, fixes #342

•   deal with unicode errors for symlinks in same way as for regular files and have a helpful warning message about how to fix wrong locale setup, fixes #382

•   add ACL keys the RobustUnpacker must know about

    Other changes:

•   improve file size displays, more flexible size formatters

•   explicitly commit to the units standard, #289

•   archiver: add E status (means that an error occured when processing this (single) item

•   do binary releases via "github releases", closes #214

•   create: use -x and --one-file-system (was: --do-not-cross-mountpoints), #296

•   a lot of changes related to using "logging" module and screen output, #233

•   show progress display if on a tty, output more progress information, #303

•   factor out status output so it is consistent, fix surrogates removal, maybe fixes #309

•   move away from RawConfigParser to ConfigParser

•   archive checker: better error logging, give chunk_id and sequence numbers (can be used together with borg debug-dump-archive-items).

•   do not mention the deprecated passphrase mode

•   emit a deprecation warning for --compression N (giving a just a number)

•   misc .coverragerc fixes (and coverage measurement improvements), fixes #319

•   refactor confirmation code, reduce code duplication, add tests

•   prettier error messages, fixes #307, #57

•   tests:

•   add a test to find disk-full issues, #327

•   travis: also run tests on Python 3.5

•   travis: use tox -r so it rebuilds the tox environments

•   test the generated pyinstaller-based binary by archiver unit tests, #215

•   vagrant: tests: announce whether fakeroot is used or not

•   vagrant: add vagrant user to fuse group for debianoid systems also

•   vagrant: llfuse install on darwin needs pkgconfig installed

•   vagrant: use pyinstaller from develop branch, fixes #336

•   benchmarks: test create, extract, list, delete, info, check, help, fixes #146

•   benchmarks: test with both the binary and the python code

•   archiver tests: test with both the binary and the python code, fixes #215

•   make basic test more robust

•   docs:

•   moved docs to borgbackup.readthedocs.org, #155

•   a lot of fixes and improvements, use mobile-friendly RTD standard theme

•   use zlib,6 compression in some examples, fixes #275

•   add missing rename usage to docs, closes #279

•   include the help offered by borg help <topic> in the usage docs, fixes #293

•   include a list of major changes compared to attic into README, fixes #224

•   add OS X install instructions, #197

•   more details about the release process, #260

•   fix linux glibc requirement (binaries built on debian7 now)

•   build: move usage and API generation to setup.py

•   update docs about return codes, #61

•   remove api docs (too much breakage on rtd)

•   borgbackup install + basics presentation (asciinema)

•   describe the current style guide in documentation

•   add section about debug commands

•   warn about not running out of space

•   add example for rename

•   improve chunker params docs, fixes #362

•   minor development docs update

  Version 0.27.0

New features:

•   "borg upgrade" command - attic -> borg one time converter / migration, #21

•   temporary hack to avoid using lots of disk space for chunks.archive.d, #235: To use it: rm -rf chunks.archive.d ; touch chunks.archive.d

•   respect XDG_CACHE_HOME, attic #181

•   add support for arbitrary SSH commands, attic #99

•   borg delete --cache-only REPO (only delete cache, not REPO), attic #123

    Bug fixes:

•   use Debian 7 (wheezy) to build pyinstaller borgbackup binaries, fixes slow down observed when running the Centos6-built binary on Ubuntu, #222

•   do not crash on empty lock.roster, fixes #232

•   fix multiple issues with the cache config version check, #234

•   fix segment entry header size check, attic #352 plus other error handling improvements / code deduplication there.

•   always give segment and offset in repo IntegrityErrors

    Other changes:

•   stop producing binary wheels, remove docs about it, #147

•   docs: - add warning about prune - generate usage include files only as needed - development docs: add Vagrant section - update / improve / reformat FAQ - hint to single-file pyinstaller binaries from README

  Version 0.26.1

This is a minor update, just docs and new pyinstaller binaries.

•   docs update about python and binary requirements

•   better docs for --read-special, fix #220

•   re-built the binaries, fix #218 and #213 (glibc version issue)

•   update web site about single-file pyinstaller binaries

    Note: if you did a python-based installation, there is no need to upgrade.

  Version 0.26.0

New features:

•   Faster cache sync (do all in one pass, remove tar/compression stuff), #163

•   BORG_REPO env var to specify the default repo, #168

•   read special files as if they were regular files, #79

•   implement borg create --dry-run, attic issue #267

•   Normalize paths before pattern matching on OS X, #143

•   support OpenBSD and NetBSD (except xattrs/ACLs)

•   support / run tests on Python 3.5

    Bug fixes:

•   borg mount repo: use absolute path, attic #200, attic #137

•   chunker: use off_t to get 64bit on 32bit platform, #178

•   initialize chunker fd to -1, so it's not equal to STDIN_FILENO (0)

•   fix reaction to "no" answer at delete repo prompt, #182

•   setup.py: detect lz4.h header file location

•   to support python < 3.2.4, add less buggy argparse lib from 3.2.6 (#194)

•   fix for obtaining char * from temporary Python value (old code causes a compile error on Mint 17.2)

•   llfuse 0.41 install troubles on some platforms, require < 0.41 (UnicodeDecodeError exception due to non-ascii llfuse setup.py)

•   cython code: add some int types to get rid of unspecific python add / subtract operations (avoid undefined symbol FPE_... error on some platforms)

•   fix verbose mode display of stdin backup

•   extract: warn if a include pattern never matched, fixes #209, implement counters for Include/ExcludePatterns

•   archive names with slashes are invalid, attic issue #180

•   chunker: add a check whether the POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED constant is defined - fixes building on OpenBSD.

    Other changes:

•   detect inconsistency / corruption / hash collision, #170

•   replace versioneer with setuptools_scm, #106

•   docs:

•   pkg-config is needed for llfuse installation

•   be more clear about pruning, attic issue #132

•   unit tests:

•   xattr: ignore security.selinux attribute showing up

•   ext3 seems to need a bit more space for a sparse file

•   do not test lzma level 9 compression (avoid MemoryError)

•   work around strange mtime granularity issue on netbsd, fixes #204

•   ignore st_rdev if file is not a block/char device, fixes #203

•   stay away from the setgid and sticky mode bits

•   use Vagrant to do easy cross-platform testing (#196), currently:

•   Debian 7 "wheezy" 32bit, Debian 8 "jessie" 64bit

•   Ubuntu 12.04 32bit, Ubuntu 14.04 64bit

•   Centos 7 64bit

•   FreeBSD 10.2 64bit

•   OpenBSD 5.7 64bit

•   NetBSD 6.1.5 64bit

•   Darwin (OS X Yosemite)

  Version 0.25.0

Compatibility notes:

•   lz4 compression library (liblz4) is a new requirement (#156)

•   the new compression code is very compatible: as long as you stay with zlib compression, older borg releases will still be able to read data from a repo/archive made with the new code (note: this is not the case for the default "none" compression, use "zlib,0" if you want a "no compression" mode that can be read by older borg). Also the new code is able to read repos and archives made with older borg versions (for all zlib levels 0..9).

    Deprecations:

•   --compression N (with N being a number, as in 0.24) is deprecated. We keep the --compression 0..9 for now to not break scripts, but it is deprecated and will be removed later, so better fix your scripts now: --compression 0 (as in 0.24) is the same as --compression zlib,0 (now). BUT: if you do not want compression, you rather want --compression none (which is the default). --compression 1 (in 0.24) is the same as --compression zlib,1 (now) --compression 9 (in 0.24) is the same as --compression zlib,9 (now)

    New features:

•   create --compression none (default, means: do not compress, just pass through data "as is". this is more efficient than zlib level 0 as used in borg 0.24)

•   create --compression lz4 (super-fast, but not very high compression)

•   create --compression zlib,N (slower, higher compression, default for N is 6)

•   create --compression lzma,N (slowest, highest compression, default N is 6)

•   honor the nodump flag (UF_NODUMP) and do not backup such items

•   list --short just outputs a simple list of the files/directories in an archive

    Bug fixes:

•   fixed --chunker-params parameter order confusion / malfunction, fixes #154

•   close fds of segments we delete (during compaction)

•   close files which fell out the lrucache

•   fadvise DONTNEED now is only called for the byte range actually read, not for the whole file, fixes #158.

•   fix issue with negative "all archives" size, fixes #165

•   restore_xattrs: ignore if setxattr fails with EACCES, fixes #162

    Other changes:

•   remove fakeroot requirement for tests, tests run faster without fakeroot (test setup does not fail any more without fakeroot, so you can run with or without fakeroot), fixes #151 and #91.

•   more tests for archiver

•   recover_segment(): don't assume we have an fd for segment

•   lrucache refactoring / cleanup, add dispose function, py.test tests

•   generalize hashindex code for any key length (less hardcoding)

•   lock roster: catch file not found in remove() method and ignore it

•   travis CI: use requirements file

•   improved docs:

•   replace hack for llfuse with proper solution (install libfuse-dev)

•   update docs about compression

•   update development docs about fakeroot

•   internals: add some words about lock files / locking system

•   support: mention BountySource and for what it can be used

•   theme: use a lighter green

•   add pypi, wheel, dist package based install docs

•   split install docs into system-specific preparations and generic instructions

  Version 0.24.0

Incompatible changes (compared to 0.23):

•   borg now always issues --umask NNN option when invoking another borg via ssh on the repository server. By that, it's making sure it uses the same umask for remote repos as for local ones. Because of this, you must upgrade both server and client(s) to 0.24.

•   the default umask is 077 now (if you do not specify via --umask) which might be a different one as you used previously. The default umask avoids that you accidentally give access permissions for group and/or others to files created by borg (e.g. the repository).

    Deprecations:

•   "--encryption passphrase" mode is deprecated, see #85 and #97. See the new "--encryption repokey" mode for a replacement.

    New features:

•   borg create --chunker-params ... to configure the chunker, fixes #16 (attic #302, attic #300, and somehow also #41). This can be used to reduce memory usage caused by chunk management overhead, so borg does not create a huge chunks index/repo index and eats all your RAM if you back up lots of data in huge files (like VM disk images). See docs/misc/create_chunker-params.txt for more information.

•   borg info now reports chunk counts in the chunk index.

•   borg create --compression 0..9 to select zlib compression level, fixes #66 (attic #295).

•   borg init --encryption repokey (to store the encryption key into the repo), fixes #85

•   improve at-end error logging, always log exceptions and set exit_code=1

•   LoggedIO: better error checks / exceptions / exception handling

•   implement --remote-path to allow non-default-path borg locations, #125

•   implement --umask M and use 077 as default umask for better security, #117

•   borg check: give a named single archive to it, fixes #139

•   cache sync: show progress indication

•   cache sync: reimplement the chunk index merging in C

    Bug fixes:

•   fix segfault that happened for unreadable files (chunker: n needs to be a signed size_t), #116

•   fix the repair mode, #144

•   repo delete: add destroy to allowed rpc methods, fixes issue #114

•   more compatible repository locking code (based on mkdir), maybe fixes #92 (attic #317, attic #201).

•   better Exception msg if no Borg is installed on the remote repo server, #56

•   create a RepositoryCache implementation that can cope with >2GiB, fixes attic #326.

•   fix Traceback when running check --repair, attic #232

•   clarify help text, fixes #73.

•   add help string for --no-files-cache, fixes #140

    Other changes:

•   improved docs:

•   added docs/misc directory for misc. writeups that won't be included "as is" into the html docs.

•   document environment variables and return codes (attic #324, attic #52)

•   web site: add related projects, fix web site url, IRC #borgbackup

•   Fedora/Fedora-based install instructions added to docs

•   Cygwin-based install instructions added to docs

•   updated AUTHORS

•   add FAQ entries about redundancy / integrity

•   clarify that borg extract uses the cwd as extraction target

•   update internals doc about chunker params, memory usage and compression

•   added docs about development

•   add some words about resource usage in general

•   document how to backup a raw disk

•   add note about how to run borg from virtual env

•   add solutions for (ll)fuse installation problems

•   document what borg check does, fixes #138

•   reorganize borgbackup.github.io sidebar, prev/next at top

•   deduplicate and refactor the docs / README.rst

•   use borg-tmp as prefix for temporary files / directories

•   short prune options without "keep-" are deprecated, do not suggest them

•   improved tox configuration

•   remove usage of unittest.mock, always use mock from pypi

•   use entrypoints instead of scripts, for better use of the wheel format and modern installs

•   add requirements.d/development.txt and modify tox.ini

•   use travis-ci for testing based on Linux and (new) OS X

•   use coverage.py, pytest-cov and codecov.io for test coverage support

    I forgot to list some stuff already implemented in 0.23.0, here they are:

    New features:

•   efficient archive list from manifest, meaning a big speedup for slow repo connections and "list <repo>", "delete <repo>", "prune" (attic #242, attic #167)

•   big speedup for chunks cache sync (esp. for slow repo connections), fixes #18

•   hashindex: improve error messages

    Other changes:

•   explicitly specify binary mode to open binary files

•   some easy micro optimizations

  Version 0.23.0

Incompatible changes (compared to attic, fork related):

•   changed sw name and cli command to "borg", updated docs

•   package name (and name in urls) uses "borgbackup" to have less collisions

•   changed repo / cache internal magic strings from ATTIC* to BORG*, changed cache location to .cache/borg/ - this means that it currently won't accept attic repos (see issue #21 about improving that)

    Bug fixes:

•   avoid defect python-msgpack releases, fixes attic #171, fixes attic #185

•   fix traceback when trying to do unsupported passphrase change, fixes attic #189

•   datetime does not like the year 10.000, fixes attic #139

•   fix "info" all archives stats, fixes attic #183

•   fix parsing with missing microseconds, fixes attic #282

•   fix misleading hint the fuse ImportError handler gave, fixes attic #237

•   check unpacked data from RPC for tuple type and correct length, fixes attic #127

•   fix Repository._active_txn state when lock upgrade fails

•   give specific path to xattr.is_enabled(), disable symlink setattr call that always fails

•   fix test setup for 32bit platforms, partial fix for attic #196

•   upgraded versioneer, PEP440 compliance, fixes attic #257

    New features:

•   less memory usage: add global option --no-cache-files

•   check --last N (only check the last N archives)

•   check: sort archives in reverse time order

•   rename repo::oldname newname (rename repository)

•   create -v output more informative

•   create --progress (backup progress indicator)

•   create --timestamp (utc string or reference file/dir)

•   create: if "-" is given as path, read binary from stdin

•   extract: if --stdout is given, write all extracted binary data to stdout

•   extract --sparse (simple sparse file support)

•   extra debug information for 'fread failed'

•   delete <repo> (deletes whole repo + local cache)

•   FUSE: reflect deduplication in allocated blocks

•   only allow whitelisted RPC calls in server mode

•   normalize source/exclude paths before matching

•   use posix_fadvise to not spoil the OS cache, fixes attic #252

•   toplevel error handler: show tracebacks for better error analysis

•   sigusr1 / sigint handler to print current file infos - attic PR #286

•   RPCError: include the exception args we get from remote

    Other changes:

•   source: misc. cleanups, pep8, style

•   docs and faq improvements, fixes, updates

•   cleanup crypto.pyx, make it easier to adapt to other AES modes

•   do os.fsync like recommended in the python docs

•   source: Let chunker optionally work with os-level file descriptor.

•   source: Linux: remove duplicate os.fsencode calls

•   source: refactor _open_rb code a bit, so it is more consistent / regular

•   source: refactor indicator (status) and item processing

•   source: use py.test for better testing, flake8 for code style checks

•   source: fix tox >=2.0 compatibility (test runner)

•   pypi package: add python version classifiers, add FreeBSD to platforms

  Attic Changelog

Here you can see the full list of changes between each Attic release until Borg forked from Attic:

  Version 0.17

(bugfix release, released on X) - Fix hashindex ARM memory alignment issue (#309) - Improve hashindex error messages (#298)

  Version 0.16

(bugfix release, released on May 16, 2015) - Fix typo preventing the security confirmation prompt from working (#303) - Improve handling of systems with improperly configured file system encoding (#289) - Fix "All archives" output for attic info. (#183) - More user friendly error message when repository key file is not found (#236) - Fix parsing of iso 8601 timestamps with zero microseconds (#282)

  Version 0.15

(bugfix release, released on Apr 15, 2015) - xattr: Be less strict about unknown/unsupported platforms (#239) - Reduce repository listing memory usage (#163). - Fix BrokenPipeError for remote repositories (#233) - Fix incorrect behavior with two character directory names (#265, #268) - Require approval before accessing relocated/moved repository (#271) - Require approval before accessing previously unknown unencrypted repositories (#271) - Fix issue with hash index files larger than 2GB. - Fix Python 3.2 compatibility issue with noatime open() (#164) - Include missing pyx files in dist files (#168)

  Version 0.14

(feature release, released on Dec 17, 2014)

•   Added support for stripping leading path segments (#95) "attic extract --strip-segments X"

•   Add workaround for old Linux systems without acl_extended_file_no_follow (#96)

•   Add MacPorts' path to the default openssl search path (#101)

•   HashIndex improvements, eliminates unnecessary IO on low memory systems.

•   Fix "Number of files" output for attic info. (#124)

•   limit create file permissions so files aren't read while restoring

•   Fix issue with empty xattr values (#106)

  Version 0.13

(feature release, released on Jun 29, 2014)

•   Fix sporadic "Resource temporarily unavailable" when using remote repositories

•   Reduce file cache memory usage (#90)

•   Faster AES encryption (utilizing AES-NI when available)

•   Experimental Linux, OS X and FreeBSD ACL support (#66)

•   Added support for backup and restore of BSDFlags (OSX, FreeBSD) (#56)

•   Fix bug where xattrs on symlinks were not correctly restored

•   Added cachedir support. CACHEDIR.TAG compatible cache directories can now be excluded using --exclude-caches (#74)

•   Fix crash on extreme mtime timestamps (year 2400+) (#81)

•   Fix Python 3.2 specific lockf issue (EDEADLK)

  Version 0.12

(feature release, released on April 7, 2014)

•   Python 3.4 support (#62)

•   Various documentation improvements a new style

•   attic mount now supports mounting an entire repository not only individual archives (#59)

•   Added option to restrict remote repository access to specific path(s): attic serve --restrict-to-path X (#51)

•   Include "all archives" size information in "--stats" output. (#54)

•   Added --stats option to attic delete and attic prune

•   Fixed bug where attic prune used UTC instead of the local time zone when determining which archives to keep.

•   Switch to SI units (Power of 1000 instead 1024) when printing file sizes

  Version 0.11

(feature release, released on March 7, 2014)

•   New "check" command for repository consistency checking (#24)

•   Documentation improvements

•   Fix exception during "attic create" with repeated files (#39)

•   New "--exclude-from" option for attic create/extract/verify.

•   Improved archive metadata deduplication.

•   "attic verify" has been deprecated. Use "attic extract --dry-run" instead.

•   "attic prune --hourly|daily|..." has been deprecated. Use "attic prune --keep-hourly|daily|..." instead.

•   Ignore xattr errors during "extract" if not supported by the filesystem. (#46)

  Version 0.10

(bugfix release, released on Jan 30, 2014)

•   Fix deadlock when extracting 0 sized files from remote repositories

•   "--exclude" wildcard patterns are now properly applied to the full path not just the file name part (#5).

•   Make source code endianness agnostic (#1)

  Version 0.9

(feature release, released on Jan 23, 2014)

•   Remote repository speed and reliability improvements.

•   Fix sorting of segment names to ignore NFS left over files. (#17)

•   Fix incorrect display of time (#13)

•   Improved error handling / reporting. (#12)

•   Use fcntl() instead of flock() when locking repository/cache. (#15)

•   Let ssh figure out port/user if not specified so we don't override .ssh/config (#9)

•   Improved libcrypto path detection (#23).

  Version 0.8.1

(bugfix release, released on Oct 4, 2013)

•   Fix segmentation fault issue.

  Version 0.8

(feature release, released on Oct 3, 2013)

•   Fix xattr issue when backing up sshfs filesystems (#4)

•   Fix issue with excessive index file size (#6)

•   Support access of read only repositories.

•

New syntax to enable repository encryption:
    attic init --encryption="none|passphrase|keyfile".

•   Detect and abort if repository is older than the cache.

  Version 0.7

(feature release, released on Aug 5, 2013)

•   Ported to FreeBSD

•   Improved documentation

•   Experimental: Archives mountable as fuse filesystems.

•   The "user." prefix is no longer stripped from xattrs on Linux

  Version 0.6.1

(bugfix release, released on July 19, 2013)

•   Fixed an issue where mtime was not always correctly restored.

  Version 0.6

First public release on July 9, 2013

  Internals

This page documents the internal data structures and storage mechanisms of Borg. It is partly based on mailing list discussion about internals and also on static code analysis.

  Repository and Archives

Borg stores its data in a Repository. Each repository can hold multiple Archives, which represent individual backups that contain a full archive of the files specified when the backup was performed. Deduplication is performed across multiple backups, both on data and metadata, using Chunks created by the chunker using the Buzhash algorithm.

Each repository has the following file structure:

README
    simple text file telling that this is a Borg repository

config
    repository configuration

data/
    directory where the actual data is stored

hints.%d
    hints for repository compaction

index.%d
    repository index

lock.roster and lock.exclusive/*
    used by the locking system to manage shared and exclusive locks

  Lock files

Borg uses locks to get (exclusive or shared) access to the cache and the repository.

The locking system is based on creating a directory lock.exclusive (for exclusive locks). Inside the lock directory, there is a file indication hostname, process id and thread id of the lock holder.

There is also a json file lock.roster that keeps a directory of all shared and exclusive lockers.

If the process can create the lock.exclusive directory for a resource, it has the lock for it. If creation fails (because the directory has already been created by some other process), lock acquisition fails.

The cache lock is usually in ~/.cache/borg/REPOID/lock.*. The repository lock is in repository/lock.*.

In case you run into troubles with the locks, you can just delete the lock.* directory and file IF you first make sure that no Borg process is running on any machine that accesses this resource. Be very careful, the cache or repository might get damaged if multiple processes use it at the same time.

  Config file

Each repository has a config file which which is a INI-style file and looks like this:

[repository]
version = 1
segments_per_dir = 10000
max_segment_size = 5242880
id = 57d6c1d52ce76a836b532b0e42e677dec6af9fca3673db511279358828a21ed6

This is where the repository.id is stored. It is a unique identifier for repositories. It will not change if you move the repository around so you can make a local transfer then decide to move the repository to another (even remote) location at a later time.

  Keys

The key to address the key/value store is usually computed like this:

key = id = id_hash(unencrypted_data)

The id_hash function is:

•   sha256 (no encryption keys available)

•   hmac-sha256 (encryption keys available)

  Segments and archives

A Borg repository is a filesystem based transactional key/value store. It makes extensive use of msgpack to store data and, unless otherwise noted, data is stored in msgpack encoded files.

Objects referenced by a key are stored inline in files (segments) of approx. 5MB size in numbered subdirectories of repo/data.

They contain:

•   header size

•   crc

•   size

•   tag

•   key

•   data

    Segments are built locally, and then uploaded. Those files are strictly append-only and modified only once.

    Tag is either PUT, DELETE, or COMMIT. A segment file is basically a transaction log where each repository operation is appended to the file. So if an object is written to the repository a PUT tag is written to the file followed by the object id and data. If an object is deleted a DELETE tag is appended followed by the object id. A COMMIT tag is written when a repository transaction is committed. When a repository is opened any PUT or DELETE operations not followed by a COMMIT tag are discarded since they are part of a partial/uncommitted transaction.

  The manifest

The manifest is an object with an all-zero key that references all the archives. It contains:

•   version

•   list of archive infos

•   timestamp

•   config

    Each archive info contains:

•   name

•   id

•   time

    It is the last object stored, in the last segment, and is replaced each time.

  The Archive

The archive metadata does not contain the file items directly. Only references to other objects that contain that data. An archive is an object that contains:

•   version

•   name

•   list of chunks containing item metadata

•   cmdline

•   hostname

•   username

•   time

  The Item

Each item represents a file, directory or other fs item and is stored as an item dictionary that contains:

•   path

•   list of data chunks

•   user

•   group

•   uid

•   gid

•   mode (item type + permissions)

•   source (for links)

•   rdev (for devices)

•   mtime

•   xattrs

•   acl

•   bsdfiles

    ctime (change time) is not stored because there is no API to set it and it is reset every time an inode's metadata is changed.

    All items are serialized using msgpack and the resulting byte stream is fed into the same chunker used for regular file data and turned into deduplicated chunks. The reference to these chunks is then added to the archive metadata.

    A chunk is stored as an object as well, of course.

  Chunks

The Borg chunker uses a rolling hash computed by the Buzhash algorithm. It triggers (chunks) when the last HASH_MASK_BITS bits of the hash are zero, producing chunks of 2^HASH_MASK_BITS Bytes on average.

create --chunker-params CHUNK_MIN_EXP,CHUNK_MAX_EXP,HASH_MASK_BITS,HASH_WINDOW_SIZE can be used to tune the chunker parameters, the default is:

•   CHUNK_MIN_EXP = 10 (minimum chunk size = 2^10 B = 1 kiB)

•   CHUNK_MAX_EXP = 23 (maximum chunk size = 2^23 B = 8 MiB)

•   HASH_MASK_BITS = 16 (statistical medium chunk size ~= 2^16 B = 64 kiB)

•   HASH_WINDOW_SIZE = 4095 [B] (0xFFF)

    The buzhash table is altered by XORing it with a seed randomly generated once for the archive, and stored encrypted in the keyfile. This is to prevent chunk size based fingerprinting attacks on your encrypted repo contents (to guess what files you have based on a specific set of chunk sizes).

    For some more general usage hints see also --chunker-params.

  Indexes / Caches

The files cache is stored in cache/files and is indexed on the file path hash. At backup time, it is used to quickly determine whether we need to chunk a given file (or whether it is unchanged and we already have all its pieces). It contains:

•   age

•   file inode number

•   file size

•   file mtime_ns

•   file content chunk hashes

    The inode number is stored to make sure we distinguish between different files, as a single path may not be unique across different archives in different setups.

    The files cache is stored as a python associative array storing python objects, which generates a lot of overhead.

    The chunks cache is stored in cache/chunks and is indexed on the chunk id_hash. It is used to determine whether we already have a specific chunk, to count references to it and also for statistics. It contains:

•   reference count

•   size

•   encrypted/compressed size

    The repository index is stored in repo/index.%d and is indexed on the chunk id_hash. It is used to determine a chunk's location in the repository. It contains:

•   segment (that contains the chunk)

•   offset (where the chunk is located in the segment)

    The repository index file is random access.

    Hints are stored in a file (repo/hints.%d). It contains:

•   version

•   list of segments

•   compact

    hints and index can be recreated if damaged or lost using check --repair.

    The chunks cache and the repository index are stored as hash tables, with only one slot per bucket, but that spreads the collisions to the following buckets. As a consequence the hash is just a start position for a linear search, and if the element is not in the table the index is linearly crossed until an empty bucket is found.

    When the hash table is almost full at 90%, its size is doubled. When it's almost empty at 25%, its size is halved. So operations on it have a variable complexity between constant and linear with low factor, and memory overhead varies between 10% and 300%.

  Indexes / Caches memory usage

Here is the estimated memory usage of Borg: chunk_count ~= total_file_size / 2 ^ HASH_MASK_BITS

repo_index_usage = chunk_count * 40

chunks_cache_usage = chunk_count * 44

files_cache_usage = total_file_count * 240 + chunk_count * 80

mem_usage ~= repo_index_usage + chunks_cache_usage + files_cache_usage
    = chunk_count * 164 + total_file_count * 240

    All units are Bytes.

    It is assuming every chunk is referenced exactly once (if you have a lot of duplicate chunks, you will have less chunks than estimated above).

    It is also assuming that typical chunk size is 2^HASH_MASK_BITS (if you have a lot of files smaller than this statistical medium chunk size, you will have more chunks than estimated above, because 1 file is at least 1 chunk).

    If a remote repository is used the repo index will be allocated on the remote side.

    E.g. backing up a total count of 1Mi files with a total size of 1TiB.

a.  with create --chunker-params 10,23,16,4095 (default): mem_usage = 2.8GiB

b.  with create --chunker-params 10,23,20,4095 (custom): mem_usage = 0.4GiB

    Note: there is also the --no-files-cache option to switch off the files cache. You'll save some memory, but it will need to read / chunk all the files then as it can not skip unmodified files then.

  Encryption

AES is used in CTR mode (so no need for padding). A 64bit initialization vector is used, a HMAC-SHA256 is computed on the encrypted chunk with a random 64bit nonce and both are stored in the chunk. The header of each chunk is : TYPE(1) + HMAC(32) + NONCE(8) + CIPHERTEXT. Encryption and HMAC use two different keys.

In AES CTR mode you can think of the IV as the start value for the counter. The counter itself is incremented by one after each 16 byte block. The IV/counter is not required to be random but it must NEVER be reused. So to accomplish this Borg initializes the encryption counter to be higher than any previously used counter value before encrypting new data.

To reduce payload size, only 8 bytes of the 16 bytes nonce is saved in the payload, the first 8 bytes are always zeros. This does not affect security but limits the maximum repository capacity to only 295 exabytes (2**64 * 16 bytes).

Encryption keys are either derived from a passphrase or kept in a key file. The passphrase is passed through the BORG_PASSPHRASE environment variable or prompted for interactive usage.

  Key files

When initialized with the init -e keyfile command, Borg needs an associated file in $HOME/.borg/keys to read and write the repository. The format is based on msgpack, base64 encoding and PBKDF2 SHA256 hashing, which is then encoded again in a msgpack.

The internal data structure is as follows:

version
    currently always an integer, 1

repository_id
    the id field in the config INI file of the repository.

enc_key
    the key used to encrypt data with AES (256 bits)

enc_hmac_key
    the key used to HMAC the encrypted data (256 bits)

id_key
    the key used to HMAC the plaintext chunk data to compute the chunk's id

chunk_seed
    the seed for the buzhash chunking table (signed 32 bit integer)

    Those fields are processed using msgpack. The utf-8 encoded passphrase is processed with PBKDF2 (SHA256, 100000 iterations, random 256 bit salt) to give us a derived key. The derived key is 256 bits long. A HMAC-SHA256 checksum of the above fields is generated with the derived key, then the derived key is also used to encrypt the above pack of fields. Then the result is stored in a another msgpack formatted as follows:

version
    currently always an integer, 1

salt
    random 256 bits salt used to process the passphrase

iterations
    number of iterations used to process the passphrase (currently 100000)

algorithm
    the hashing algorithm used to process the passphrase and do the HMAC checksum (currently the string sha256)

hash
    the HMAC of the encrypted derived key

data
    the derived key, encrypted with AES over a PBKDF2 SHA256 key described above

    The resulting msgpack is then encoded using base64 and written to the key file, wrapped using the standard textwrap module with a header. The header is a single line with a MAGIC string, a space and a hexadecimal representation of the repository id.

  Compression

Borg supports the following compression methods:

•   none (no compression, pass through data 1:1)

•   lz4 (low compression, but super fast)

•   zlib (level 0-9, level 0 is no compression [but still adding zlib overhead], level 1 is low, level 9 is high compression)

•   lzma (level 0-9, level 0 is low, level 9 is high compression).

    Speed: none > lz4 > zlib > lzma Compression: lzma > zlib > lz4 > none

    Be careful, higher zlib and especially lzma compression levels might take a lot of resources (CPU and memory).

    The overall speed of course also depends on the speed of your target storage. If that is slow, using a higher compression level might yield better overall performance. You need to experiment a bit. Maybe just watch your CPU load, if that is relatively low, increase compression until 1 core is 70-100% loaded.

    Even if your target storage is rather fast, you might see interesting effects: while doing no compression at all (none) is a operation that takes no time, it likely will need to store more data to the storage compared to using lz4. The time needed to transfer and store the additional data might be much more than if you had used lz4 (which is super fast, but still might compress your data about 2:1). This is assuming your data is compressible (if you backup already compressed data, trying to compress them at backup time is usually pointless).

    Compression is applied after deduplication, thus using different compression methods in one repo does not influence deduplication.

    See borg create --help about how to specify the compression level and its default.

  Development

This chapter will get you started with Borg' development.

Borg is written in Python (with a little bit of Cython and C for the performance critical parts).

  Style guide

We generally follow pep8, with 120 columns instead of 79. We do not use form-feed (^L) characters to separate sections either. The flake8 commandline tool should be used to check for style errors before sending pull requests.

  Output and Logging

When writing logger calls, always use correct log level (debug only for debugging, info for informative messages, warning for warnings, error for errors, critical for critical errors/states).

When directly talking to the user (e.g. Y/N questions), do not use logging, but directly output to stderr (not: stdout, it could be connected to a pipe).

To control the amount and kinds of messages output to stderr or emitted at info level, use flags like --stats.

  Building a development environment

First, just install borg into a virtual env as described before.

To install some additional packages needed for running the tests, activate your virtual env and run:

pip install -r requirements.d/development.txt

  Running the tests

The tests are in the borg/testsuite package.

To run all the tests, you need to have fakeroot installed. If you do not have fakeroot, you still will be able to run most tests, just leave away the fakeroot -u from the given command lines.

To run the test suite use the following command:

fakeroot -u tox  # run all tests

Some more advanced examples:

# verify a changed tox.ini (run this after any change to tox.ini):
fakeroot -u tox --recreate
fakeroot -u tox -e py32  # run all tests, but only on python 3.2
fakeroot -u tox borg.testsuite.locking  # only run 1 test module
fakeroot -u tox borg.testsuite.locking -- -k '"not Timer"'  # exclude some tests
fakeroot -u tox borg.testsuite -- -v  # verbose py.test

Important notes:

•   When using -- to give options to py.test, you MUST also give borg.testsuite[.module].

  Regenerate usage files

Usage and API documentation is currently committed directly to git, although those files are generated automatically from the source tree.

When a new module is added, the docs/api.rst file needs to be regenerated:

./setup.py build_api

When a command is added, a commandline flag changed, added or removed, the usage docs need to be rebuilt as well:

./setup.py build_usage

  Building the docs with Sphinx

The documentation (in reStructuredText format, .rst) is in docs/.

To build the html version of it, you need to have sphinx installed:

pip3 install sphinx  # important: this will install sphinx with Python 3

Now run:

cd docs/
make html

Then point a web browser at docs/_build/html/index.html.

The website is updated automatically through Github web hooks on the main repository.

  Using Vagrant

We use Vagrant for the automated creation of testing environments and borgbackup standalone binaries for various platforms.

For better security, there is no automatic sync in the VM to host direction. The plugin vagrant-scp is useful to copy stuff from the VMs to the host.

Usage:

To create and provision the VM:
  vagrant up OS
To create an ssh session to the VM:
  vagrant ssh OS command
To shut down the VM:
  vagrant halt OS
To shut down and destroy the VM:
  vagrant destroy OS
To copy files from the VM (in this case, the generated binary):
  vagrant scp OS:/vagrant/borg/borg.exe .

  Creating standalone binaries

Make sure you have everything built and installed (including llfuse and fuse). When using the Vagrant VMs, pyinstaller will already be installed.

With virtual env activated:

pip install pyinstaller>=3.0  # or git checkout master
pyinstaller -F -n borg-PLATFORM borg/__main__.py
for file in dist/borg-*; do gpg --armor --detach-sign $file; done

If you encounter issues, see also our Vagrantfile for details.

NOTE: Standalone binaries built with pyinstaller are supposed to work on same OS, same architecture (x86 32bit, amd64 64bit) without external dependencies.

  Creating a new release

Checklist:

•   make sure all issues for this milestone are closed or moved to the next milestone

•   find and fix any low hanging fruit left on the issue tracker

•   run tox on all supported platforms via vagrant, check for test failures

•   check that Travis CI is also happy

•   update CHANGES.rst, based on git log $PREVIOUS_RELEASE..

•   check version number of upcoming release in CHANGES.rst

•   verify that MANIFEST.in and setup.py are complete

•   tag the release:

    git tag -s -m "tagged/signed release X.Y.Z" X.Y.Z

•   build fresh docs and update the web site with them

•   create a release on PyPi:

    python setup.py register sdist upload --identity="Thomas Waldmann" --sign

•   close release milestone on Github

•   announce on:

•   Mailing list

•   Twitter (follow @ThomasJWaldmann for these tweets)

•   IRC channel (change /topic)

•   create a Github release, include: * standalone binaries (see above for how to create them)

•   for OS X, document the OS X Fuse version in the README of the binaries. OS X FUSE uses a kernel extension that needs to be compatible with the code contained in the binary.

•   a link to CHANGES.rst

  Contributors ("The Borg Collective")

•   Thomas Waldmann <tw@waldmann-edv.de>

•   Antoine Beaupré <anarcat@debian.org>

•   Radek Podgorny <radek@podgorny.cz>

•   Yuri D'Elia

  Attic authors

Borg is a fork of Attic. Attic is written and maintained by Jonas Borgström and various contributors:

  Development Lead

•   Jonas Borgström <jonas@borgstrom.se>

  Patches and Suggestions

•   Brian Johnson

•   Cyril Roussillon

•   Dan Christensen

•   Jeremy Maitin-Shepard

•   Johann Klähn

•   Petros Moisiadis

•   Thomas Waldmann

  License

Copyright (C) 2015 The Borg Collective (see AUTHORS file)
Copyright (C) 2010-2014 Jonas Borgström <jonas@borgstrom.se>
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
    the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
    distribution.
 3. The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote
    products derived from this software without specific prior
    written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY
DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE
GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS
INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER
IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR
OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN
IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

COPYRIGHT
2010-2014 Jonas Borgström, 2015 The Borg Collective (see AUTHORS file)