Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

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I think you are both not quite right ...

Which is to say, you don't need the borg executable server-side if you are happy to run it over SFTP transport which limits some functionality.

Yes, of course you could talk over an sshfs mount point but I can't think of why you would do that over the more basic SFTP transport.

The accepted, and full-featured, way to run borg is with the executable on the server side and I will point out that the borg project distributes a "frozen" version of the tool that allows you to run it without having python in your environment. I believe they use py2exe to pack it up.

This is important for us[1] as we have no interpreters of any kind in our environment (no shell, no python, no perl) so we can only run binary executables ...

[1] rsync.net

In the FAQ [1] SSHFS is mentioned a few times and here is the citation where I got this idea from when I read it way back when:

“When Borg is writing to a repo on a locally mounted remote file system, e.g. SSHFS, the Borg client only can do file system operations and has no agent running on the remote side, so every operation needs to go over the network, which is slower.”

SSHFS would be tool agnostic/transparent though of course would result in operations going over the network as it’s not a local repo, but pseudo-local.

I’m curious, how do you use plain SFTP transport with borg using rsync.net?

[1] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html

hmmm ... it appears that I might be the one that is not quite right ... I was positive that there was a less-featured usage mode over plain old SFTP.

Either way, having the borg executable on the server side is the "correct" way to do things.

borg does either use a directory as repo (no matter whether local or mounted via network fs) or works client/server via pipes that are usually over ssh (in that case, it needs a remote borg process to talk to). instead of ssh, one could also use anything rsh-like, but of course ssh is the best option here.

no sftp inside borg (nor anything else).

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