Borgbackup – Deduplicating Archiver

BorgBackup (Borg) is a deduplicating backup program with optional compression and authenticated encryption. The main goal of Borg is to provide an efficient and secure way to backup data. Using content-defined chunking and deduplication, Borg minimizes storage requirements while maintaining fast backup speeds. It is trusted by system administrators worldwide for critical data protection.

Key Features

• Deduplication – Space-efficient storage through content-defined chunking
• Compression – LZ4, zstd, zlib, and lzma compression algorithms
• Encryption – AES-256-CTR with HMAC-SHA256 authentication
• Remote Repositories – Backup over SSH to remote servers
• Mountable Backups – Mount archives as FUSE filesystem
• Pruning – Automatic retention policy management

Installation

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install borgbackup

# RHEL/CentOS/Fedora
sudo dnf install borgbackup

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S borg

# Using pip
pip install borgbackup

Basic Usage

# Initialize repository
borg init --encryption=repokey /backup/repo

# Create backup
borg create /backup/repo::backup-{now} ~/Documents

# List archives
borg list /backup/repo

# Extract archive
borg extract /backup/repo::backup-name

# Mount backup as filesystem
borg mount /backup/repo::backup-name /mnt/backup

# Prune old backups
borg prune --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6 /backup/repo

Use Cases

Borg is perfect for server backups, home directory protection, database backups, offsite replication, and any scenario requiring efficient deduplication.

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