Borgbackup

borgbackup is a deduplicating backup software

Installation

Installation

sudo apt install borgbackup

If you want the latest version, you can download a static build from releases or use this backport repo.

Usage

quickstart

Create a repo

borg init

# Create a repo without encryption
borg init --encryption=none ./testrepo

# If you want encryption
borg init --encryption=repokey ./testrepo

Create a backup

borg create

The following will create a backup of ~/src titled Monday to the repo ./testrepo.

borg create --stats --progress ./testrepo::Monday ~/src

Notes

• Name placeholders: {now}, {utcnow}, {fqdn}, {hostname}, {user}
• Progress shows (O, C, D, N) which correspond to original size, compressed size, deduplicated size, and number of files processed.
  • Deduplicated size is the additional size consumed on disk after compression and deduplication.

Examples

borg create \
  --stats --progress --show-rc \
  ./testrepo::'{hostname}-daily-{utcnow}' \
  /src

Pruning backups

borg prune

If you're scripting daily, weekly, or monthly backups, you'll probably want to prune old backups.
The command below will keep one backup from today, one backup from last week, and one backup from one month.

borg prune --keep-daily 1 --keep-weekly 1 --keep-monthly 1 remote:~/my_backup

Extract

See extract

borg extract --progress <archive>

• Note that borgbackup 1.1.11 included in Ubuntu 20.04 has a memory leak when using --progress documented here. Download a newer version of borgbackup.
• You should extract to an empty folder since borg does not delete existing files in the target folder.

Scheduling

borgmatic

See https://torsion.org/borgmatic/

Bash Script

Below is a bash script you can call from cron or systemd.

backup.sh

#!/bin/bash
REPOSITORY="my_server:~/Backups/my_backup"
ARCHIVE_NAME="{hostname}-{utcnow}"
SOURCE_DIR="/home/david/"
BACKUP_DIRS=(
  "."
)
BORG_CREATE_FLAGS=(
  "--stats"
  "--progress"
  "-x"
  "--show-rc"
)
BORG_PRUNE_FLAGS=(
  "--keep-daily"
  "3"
  "--keep-weekly"
  "1"
  "--keep-monthly"
  "1"
  #  "--stats"
  "--list"
  "--show-rc"
)
EXCLUSIONS=(
  "-e" "System Volume Information"
  "-e" "\$RECYCLE.BIN"
)
BORG_EXEC="borg"
export BORG_UNKNOWN_UNENCRYPTED_REPO_ACCESS_IS_OK=yes
export BORG_RELOCATED_REPO_ACCESS_IS_OK=yes
LOCKFILE=/tmp/backup_server.lockfile
LOGFILE=/home/david/Documents/server-backup-scripts/my_backup.log

exec {lock_fd}>$LOCKFILE || exit 1
flock -n "$lock_fd" || {
  echo "Another instance is running" >&2
  exit 1
}

function send_fail_email {
  {
    echo From: [email protected]
    echo To: [email protected]
    echo Subject: my_backup failed
    echo
    echo my_backup failed
  } | /usr/lib/sendmail -t
  exit
}

if [ -d "${SOURCE_DIR}" ]
then
  # shellcheck disable=SC2015
  cd "${SOURCE_DIR}" && \
    $BORG_EXEC create "${BORG_CREATE_FLAGS[@]}" "${EXCLUSIONS[@]}" "${REPOSITORY}"::"${ARCHIVE_NAME}" "${BACKUP_DIRS[@]}" 2>&1 | tee "$LOGFILE" &&
    $BORG_EXEC prune "${BORG_PRUNE_FLAGS[@]}" "${REPOSITORY}" | tee -a "$LOGFILE" ||
    send_fail_email
fi

Borg vs Restic

Restic is a very similar piece of software which supports backing up to S3-compatible (e.g. S3, Minio, Backblaze B2) storage.

Hosted Services

See https://www.borgbackup.org/support/commercial.html

Resources

• practical-admin backups using borg