ThomasWaldmann

borg maintainer here:

Yeah, restic is a great backup tool also.

OTOH it is a pity the we could not join forces (Python vs. Go and also some other differences), but otoh it means more choice for everybody wanting a nice deduplicating backup tool.

Just wanted to point to the FAQ section inside the borg docs.

https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#can-i-c...

1. as borg always does FULL backups, it needs to access all files' metadata anyway. that together with borg's "files cache" enables borg to quickly detect and back up unchanged files. the created archive always contains ALL files.

2. for many users not that important for the daily backups, because they are quick anyway. for first backup or for users with huge daily changes, it would be nice to have though, that's why it is on the long term TODO.

if you want to put more load on the CPU, you can partition your input data, feed each partition to a separate borg process (and separate borg repo). multiprocessing instead of multithreading.

I don't know exdupe, but from a quick glance at their homepage it looks like a full + differential style backup.

With borg, every backup is logically a full backup (it just is faster due to deduplication). Much easier and less time consuming to deal with.

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).

borg maintainer here:

attic should not be on the list, it is unmaintained since 2015.

borg came into life as a fork of attic for related reasons, so it should be borg (Python+Cython+C).

Maybe have a look at borgbackup docs to use the same terminology, otherwise it might get confusing.

When you create a backup ARCHIVE in a borg REPOSITORY, the archive contains all input files you gave to borg.

Each archive has a name and usually the name is something like machinename-setname-date-time.

You can create such backups rather often (that is cheap, due to deduplication), but you do not want to keep tons of archives long term (some borg commands take O(archive count) time).

Thus, one runs borg prune to "thin out" archives and only keep some following some prune policy, like keeping 60 daily, 12 monthly, 10 yearly or so.

It is important to use --prefix if one creates multiple different archive sequences in the same repo, e.g. if you create pc-home-date-time as well as pc-system-date-time - then you need to run prune with --prefix=pc-home- and another prune with --prefix=pc-system- .

Usually, archives are not modified after their creation (the only way to do that is to carefully use borg recreate command).