Data Backup Digest

BorgBackup (or Borg for short) is a deduplicating backup program that also supports compression and authenticated encryption. If you’re looking for a backup solution that works across various platforms and is quick and simple to control, Borg might be the answer you’re looking for.

The aim of the program is to give users a secure and efficient way to back up their data. Because it supports deduplication, it means Borg can be run every day with little overhead because only changes made to the data since the last backup will be captured. The encryption support means that the backups can be sent to other locations in the knowledge that they’ll remain safe.

Borg splits the data into chunks, each a variable length, and only those that have never been seen before by the backup will be added. All chunks are considered in this process, whether they came from multiple machines, previous backups, a single file, or anything. It doesn’t depend on file names staying the same, time stamp differences, or the absolute position of a chunk within a file. As such, the deduplication on offer is truly flexible.

The data is encrypted on the client side and is protected using 256-bit AES encryption, with data integrity and authentic verified using HMAC-SHA256. Different compression techniques are offered – lz4, zlib and lzma – which offer a variety of speeds and compression levels.

Borg can be used for off-site backups, which is vital if you want a plan that accounts for redundancy. Only storing things locally isn’t good enough. Data can be stored on any remote host via SSH, which also offers performance improvements compared to a network filesystem.

The backups archives can also be mounted as user space filesystems, allowing for simple interactive backup inspection and restoration through a file manager, though a command prompt can also be used for those who prefer it.

For those who have unstable connections, or need to backup or restore huge file sets via an unstable connection, Borg has you covered. That’s because it supports resuming backups. A checkpoint can be adjusted (by default, it’s set to 30 minutes) which contains all the data backed up until that point. This checkpoint is a valid archive, in that it’ll properly contain data, but it just won’t have the entire data from your backup.

Perhaps the best thing of all is that Borg is entirely free, open source and available for a variety of platforms. Single-file binaries are available which means nothing needs to be installed; it can just run independently.

You may know of Borg if you’re familiar with Attic. The former is a fork of the latter and has fixed a lot of issues and added new features. Borg isn’t compatible with Attic, but you can do a one-way conversion if you want to move between the two programs.

For more information on Borg, like how to set it up and to get answers to any questions you might have, either head on over to {{https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/|the official website}}.