BORG(1) borg backup tool BORG(1)

borg - deduplicating and encrypting backup tool

borg [common options] <command> [options] [arguments]

BorgBackup (short: Borg) is a deduplicating backup program. Optionally, it supports compression and authenticated encryption.

The main goal of Borg is to provide an efficient and secure way to back data up. The data deduplication technique used makes Borg suitable for daily backups since only changes are stored. The authenticated encryption technique makes it suitable for backups to targets not fully trusted.

Borg stores a set of files in an archive. A repository is a collection of archives. The format of repositories is Borg-specific. Borg does not distinguish archives from each other in any way other than their name, it does not matter when or where archives were created (e.g. different hosts).

1.
Before a backup can be made, a repository has to be initialized:

$ borg -r /path/to/repo repo-create --encryption=repokey-aes-ocb


2.
Back up the ~/src and ~/Documents directories into an archive called docs:

$ borg -r /path/to/repo create docs ~/src ~/Documents


3.
The next day create a new archive using the same archive name:

$ borg -r /path/to/repo create --stats docs ~/src ~/Documents


This backup will be a lot quicker and a lot smaller since only new, never before seen data is stored. The --stats option causes Borg to output statistics about the newly created archive such as the deduplicated size (the amount of unique data not shared with other archives):

Repository: /path/to/repo
Archive name: docs
Archive fingerprint: bcd1b53f9b4991b7afc2b339f851b7ffe3c6d030688936fe4552eccc1877718d
Time (start): Sat, 2022-06-25 20:21:43
Time (end):   Sat, 2022-06-25 20:21:43
Duration: 0.07 seconds
Utilization of max. archive size: 0%
Number of files: 699
Original size: 31.14 MB
Deduplicated size: 502 B


4.
List all archives in the repository:

$ borg -r /path/to/repo repo-list
docs                                 Sat, 2022-06-25 20:21:14 [b80e24d2...b179f298]
docs                                 Sat, 2022-06-25 20:21:43 [bcd1b53f...1877718d]


5.
List the contents of the first archive:

$ borg -r /path/to/repo list aid:b80e24d2
drwxr-xr-x user   group          0 Mon, 2016-02-15 18:22:30 home/user/Documents
-rw-r--r-- user   group       7961 Mon, 2016-02-15 18:22:30 home/user/Documents/Important.doc
...


6.
Restore the first archive by extracting the files relative to the current directory:

$ borg -r /path/to/repo extract aid:b80e24d2


7.
Delete the first archive (please note that this does not free repo disk space):

$ borg -r /path/to/repo delete aid:b80e24d2


Be careful if you use an archive NAME (and not an archive ID), that might match multiple archives! Always first use with --dry-run and --list!

8.
Recover disk space by compacting the segment files in the repo:

$ borg -r /path/to/repo compact -v



NOTE:

Borg is quiet by default (it defaults to WARNING log level). You can use options like --progress or --list to get specific reports during command execution. You can also add the -v (or --verbose or --info) option to adjust the log level to INFO to get other informational messages.


Borg only supports taking options (-s and --progress in the example) to the left or right of all positional arguments (repo::archive and path in the example), but not in between them:

borg create -s --progress archive path  # good and preferred
borg create archive path -s --progress  # also works
borg create -s archive path --progress  # works, but ugly
borg create archive -s --progress path  # BAD


This is due to a problem in the argparse module: <https://bugs.python.org/issue15112>

Local filesystem (or locally mounted network filesystem):

/path/to/repo - filesystem path to repo directory, absolute path

path/to/repo - filesystem path to repo directory, relative path

Also, stuff like ~/path/to/repo or ~other/path/to/repo works (this is expanded by your shell).

Note: you may also prepend a file:// to a filesystem path to get URL style.

Remote repositories accessed via ssh <user@host> :

ssh://user@host:port//abs/path/to/repo - absolute path

ssh://user@host:port/rel/path/to/repo - path relative to current directory

Remote repositories accessed via sftp:

sftp://user@host:port//abs/path/to/repo - absolute path

sftp://user@host:port/rel/path/to/repo - path relative to current directory

For ssh and sftp URLs, the user@ and :port parts are optional.

Remote repositories accessed via rclone:

rclone:remote:path - see the rclone docs for more details about remote:path.

If you frequently need the same repo URL, it is a good idea to set the BORG_REPO environment variable to set a default for the repo URL:

export BORG_REPO='ssh://user@host:port/rel/path/to/repo'


Then just leave away the --repo option if you want to use the default - it will be read from BORG_REPO then.

Many commands need to know the repository location, give it via -r / --repo or use the BORG_REPO environment variable.

Commands needing one or two archive names usually get them as positional argument.

Commands working with an arbitrary amount of archives, usually take -a ARCH_GLOB.

Archive names must not contain the / (slash) character. For simplicity, maybe also avoid blanks or other characters that have special meaning on the shell or in a filesystem (borg mount will use the archive name as directory name).

Borg writes all log output to stderr by default. But please note that something showing up on stderr does not indicate an error condition just because it is on stderr. Please check the log levels of the messages and the return code of borg for determining error, warning or success conditions.

If you want to capture the log output to a file, just redirect it:

borg create repo::archive myfiles 2>> logfile


Custom logging configurations can be implemented via BORG_LOGGING_CONF.

The log level of the builtin logging configuration defaults to WARNING. This is because we want Borg to be mostly silent and only output warnings, errors and critical messages, unless output has been requested by supplying an option that implies output (e.g. --list or --progress).

Log levels: DEBUG < INFO < WARNING < ERROR < CRITICAL

Use --debug to set DEBUG log level - to get debug, info, warning, error and critical level output.

Use --info (or -v or --verbose) to set INFO log level - to get info, warning, error and critical level output.

Use --warning (default) to set WARNING log level - to get warning, error and critical level output.

Use --error to set ERROR log level - to get error and critical level output.

Use --critical to set CRITICAL log level - to get critical level output.

While you can set misc. log levels, do not expect that every command will give different output on different log levels - it's just a possibility.

WARNING:

Options --critical and --error are provided for completeness, their usage is not recommended as you might miss important information.


Borg can exit with the following return codes (rc):

Return code Meaning
0 success (logged as INFO)
1 generic warning (operation reached its normal end, but there were warnings -- you should check the log, logged as WARNING)
2 generic error (like a fatal error, a local or remote exception, the operation did not reach its normal end, logged as ERROR)
3..99 specific error (enabled by BORG_EXIT_CODES=modern)
100..127 specific warning (enabled by BORG_EXIT_CODES=modern)
128+N killed by signal N (e.g. 137 == kill -9)

If you use --show-rc, the return code is also logged at the indicated level as the last log entry.

The modern exit codes (return codes, "rc") are documented there: msgid

Borg uses some environment variables for automation:

When set, use the value to give the default repository location. Use this so you do not need to type --repo /path/to/my/repo all the time.
Similar to BORG_REPO, but gives the default for --other-repo.
When set, use the value to answer the passphrase question for encrypted repositories. It is used when a passphrase is needed to access an encrypted repo as well as when a new passphrase should be initially set when initializing an encrypted repo. See also BORG_NEW_PASSPHRASE.
When set, use the standard output of the command (trailing newlines are stripped) to answer the passphrase question for encrypted repositories. It is used when a passphrase is needed to access an encrypted repo as well as when a new passphrase should be initially set when initializing an encrypted repo. Note that the command is executed without a shell. So variables, like $HOME will work, but ~ won't. If BORG_PASSPHRASE is also set, it takes precedence. See also BORG_NEW_PASSPHRASE.
When set, specifies a file descriptor to read a passphrase from. Programs starting borg may choose to open an anonymous pipe and use it to pass a passphrase. This is safer than passing via BORG_PASSPHRASE, because on some systems (e.g. Linux) environment can be examined by other processes. If BORG_PASSPHRASE or BORG_PASSCOMMAND are also set, they take precedence.
When set, use the value to answer the passphrase question when a new passphrase is asked for. This variable is checked first. If it is not set, BORG_PASSPHRASE and BORG_PASSCOMMAND will also be checked. Main usecase for this is to automate fully borg change-passphrase.
When set, use the value to answer the "display the passphrase for verification" question when defining a new passphrase for encrypted repositories.
When set to "modern", the borg process will return more specific exit codes (rc). When set to "legacy", the borg process will return rc 2 for all errors, 1 for all warnings, 0 for success. Default is "modern".
Borg usually computes a host id from the FQDN plus the results of uuid.getnode() (which usually returns a unique id based on the MAC address of the network interface. Except if that MAC happens to be all-zero - in that case it returns a random value, which is not what we want (because it kills automatic stale lock removal). So, if you have a all-zero MAC address or other reasons to control better externally the host id, just set this environment variable to a unique value. If all your FQDNs are unique, you can just use the FQDN. If not, use <fqdn@uniqueid> .
You can set the default value for the --lock-wait option with this, so you do not need to give it as a commandline option.
When set, use the given filename as INI <https://docs.python.org/3/library/logging.config.html#configuration-file-format> -style logging configuration. A basic example conf can be found at docs/misc/logging.conf.
When set, use this command instead of ssh. This can be used to specify ssh options, such as a custom identity file ssh -i /path/to/private/key. See man ssh for other options. Using the --rsh CMD commandline option overrides the environment variable.
When set, use the given path as borg executable on the remote (defaults to "borg" if unset). Using --remote-path PATH commandline option overrides the environment variable.
When set to a value at least one character long, instructs borg to use a specifically named (based on the suffix) alternative files cache. This can be used to avoid loading and saving cache entries for backup sources other than the current sources.
When set to a numeric value, this determines the maximum "time to live" for the files cache entries (default: 2). The files cache is used to determine quickly whether a file is unchanged.
When set to no (default: yes), the chunks.archive.d folder will not be used. This reduces disk space usage but slows down cache resyncs.
When set to no (default: yes), system information (like OS, Python version, ...) in exceptions is not shown. Please only use for good reasons as it makes issues harder to analyze.
Choose the lowlevel FUSE implementation borg shall use for borg mount. This is a comma-separated list of implementation names, they are tried in the given order, e.g.:
  • pyfuse3,llfuse: default, first try to load pyfuse3, then try to load llfuse.
  • llfuse,pyfuse3: first try to load llfuse, then try to load pyfuse3.
  • pyfuse3: only try to load pyfuse3
  • llfuse: only try to load llfuse
  • none: do not try to load an implementation

This can be used to influence borg's builtin self-tests. The default is to execute the tests at the beginning of each borg command invocation.

BORG_SELFTEST=disabled can be used to switch off the tests and rather save some time. Disabling is not recommended for normal borg users, but large scale borg storage providers can use this to optimize production servers after at least doing a one-time test borg (with selftests not disabled) when installing or upgrading machines / OS / borg.

A list of comma separated strings that trigger workarounds in borg, e.g. to work around bugs in other software.

Currently known strings are:

Use the more simple BaseSyncFile code to avoid issues with sync_file_range. You might need this to run borg on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) or in systemd.nspawn containers on some architectures (e.g. ARM). Using this does not affect data safety, but might result in a more bursty write to disk behaviour (not continuously streaming to disk).
Retry opening a file without O_NOATIME if opening a file with O_NOATIME caused EROFS. You will need this to make archives from volume shadow copies in WSL1 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 1).
Work around a lost passphrase or key for an authenticated mode repository (these are only authenticated, but not encrypted). If the key is missing in the repository config, add key = anything there.

This workaround is only for emergencies and only to extract data from an affected repository (read-only access):

BORG_WORKAROUNDS=authenticated_no_key borg extract repo::archive


After you have extracted all data you need, you MUST delete the repository:

BORG_WORKAROUNDS=authenticated_no_key borg delete repo


Now you can init a fresh repo. Make sure you do not use the workaround any more.



Giving the default value for borg repo-list --format=X.
Giving the default value for borg repo-list --format=X.
Giving the default value for borg prune --format=X.

For "Warning: Attempting to access a previously unknown unencrypted repository"
For "Warning: The repository at location ... was previously located at ..."
For "This is a potentially dangerous function..." (check --repair)
For "You requested to DELETE the repository completely including all archives it contains:"

Note: answers are case sensitive. setting an invalid answer value might either give the default answer or ask you interactively, depending on whether retries are allowed (they by default are allowed). So please test your scripts interactively before making them a non-interactive script.


Defaults to $HOME or ~$USER or ~ (in that order). If you want to move all borg-specific folders to a custom path at once, all you need to do is to modify BORG_BASE_DIR: the other paths for cache, config etc. will adapt accordingly (assuming you didn't set them to a different custom value).
Defaults to $BORG_BASE_DIR/.cache/borg. If BORG_BASE_DIR is not explicitly set while XDG env var <https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/0.6/ar01s03.html>
XDG_CACHE_HOME is set, then $XDG_CACHE_HOME/borg is being used instead. This directory contains the local cache and might need a lot of space for dealing with big repositories. Make sure you're aware of the associated security aspects of the cache location: cache_security
Defaults to $BORG_BASE_DIR/.config/borg. If BORG_BASE_DIR is not explicitly set while XDG env var <https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/0.6/ar01s03.html>
XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set, then $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/borg is being used instead. This directory contains all borg configuration directories, see the FAQ for a security advisory about the data in this directory: home_config_borg
Defaults to $BORG_BASE_DIR/.local/share/borg. If BORG_BASE_DIR is not explicitly set while XDG env var <https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/0.6/ar01s03.html>
XDG_DATA_HOME is set, then $XDG_DATA_HOME/borg is being used instead. This directory contains all borg data directories, see the FAQ for a security advisory about the data in this directory: home_data_borg
Defaults to $BORG_BASE_DIR/.cache/borg. If BORG_BASE_DIR is not explicitly set while XDG env var <https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/0.6/ar01s03.html>
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is set, then $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/borg is being used instead. This directory contains borg runtime files, like e.g. the socket file.
Defaults to $BORG_DATA_DIR/security. This directory contains security relevant data.
Defaults to $BORG_CONFIG_DIR/keys. This directory contains keys for encrypted repositories.
When set, use the given path as repository key file. Please note that this is only for rather special applications that externally fully manage the key files:
  • this setting only applies to the keyfile modes (not to the repokey modes).
  • using a full, absolute path to the key file is recommended.
  • all directories in the given path must exist.
  • this setting forces borg to use the key file at the given location.
  • the key file must either exist (for most commands) or will be created (borg repo-create).
  • you need to give a different path for different repositories.
  • you need to point to the correct key file matching the repository the command will operate on.

This is where temporary files are stored (might need a lot of temporary space for some operations), see tempfile <https://docs.python.org/3/library/tempfile.html#tempfile.gettempdir>
for details.

Adds given OpenSSL header file directory to the default locations (setup.py).
Adds given prefix directory to the default locations. If an 'include/acl/libacl.h' is found Borg will be linked against the system libacl instead of a bundled implementation. (setup.py)
Adds given prefix directory to the default locations. If a 'include/lz4.h' is found Borg will be linked against the system liblz4 instead of a bundled implementation. (setup.py)
Adds given prefix directory to the default locations. If a 'include/zstd.h' is found Borg will be linked against the system libzstd instead of a bundled implementation. (setup.py)


Please note:

  • Be very careful when using the "yes" sayers, the warnings with prompt exist for your / your data's security/safety.
  • Also be very careful when putting your passphrase into a script, make sure it has appropriate file permissions (e.g. mode 600, root:root).

We recommend using a reliable, scalable journaling filesystem for the repository, e.g. zfs, btrfs, ext4, apfs.

Borg now uses the borgstore package to implement the key/value store it uses for the repository.

It currently uses the file: Store (posixfs backend) either with a local directory or via ssh and a remote borg serve agent using borgstore on the remote side.

This means that it will store each chunk into a separate filesystem file (for more details, see the borgstore project).

This has some pros and cons (compared to legacy borg 1.x's segment files):

Pros:

  • Simplicity and better maintainability of the borg code.
  • Sometimes faster, less I/O, better scalability: e.g. borg compact can just remove unused chunks by deleting a single file and does not need to read and re-write segment files to free space.
  • In future, easier to adapt to other kinds of storage: borgstore's backends are quite simple to implement. sftp: and rclone: backends already exist, others might be easy to add.
  • Parallel repository access with less locking is easier to implement.

Cons:

  • The repository filesystem will have to deal with a big amount of files (there are provisions in borgstore against having too many files in a single directory by using a nested directory structure).
  • Bigger fs space usage overhead (will depend on allocation block size - modern filesystems like zfs are rather clever here using a variable block size).
  • Sometimes slower, due to less sequential / more random access operations.

To display quantities, Borg takes care of respecting the usual conventions of scale. Disk sizes are displayed in decimal <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal> , using powers of ten (so kB means 1000 bytes). For memory usage, binary prefixes <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix>
are used, and are indicated using the IEC binary prefixes <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_80000-13#Prefixes_for_binary_multiples> , using powers of two (so KiB means 1024 bytes).

We format date and time conforming to ISO-8601, that is: YYYY-MM-DD and HH:MM:SS (24h clock).

For more information about that, see: <https://xkcd.com/1179/>

Unless otherwise noted, we display local date and time. Internally, we store and process date and time as UTC. TIMESPAN

Some options accept a TIMESPAN parameter, which can be given as a number of days (e.g. 7d) or months (e.g. 12m).

Borg might use a lot of resources depending on the size of the data set it is dealing with.

If one uses Borg in a client/server way (with a ssh: repository), the resource usage occurs in part on the client and in another part on the server.

If one uses Borg as a single process (with a filesystem repo), all the resource usage occurs in that one process, so just add up client + server to get the approximate resource usage.

  • borg create: does chunking, hashing, compression, crypto (high CPU usage)
  • chunks cache sync: quite heavy on CPU, doing lots of hashtable operations.
  • borg extract: crypto, decompression (medium to high CPU usage)
  • borg check: similar to extract, but depends on options given.
  • borg prune / borg delete archive: low to medium CPU usage
  • borg delete repo: done on the server

It won't go beyond 100% of 1 core as the code is currently single-threaded. Especially higher zlib and lzma compression levels use significant amounts of CPU cycles. Crypto might be cheap on the CPU (if hardware accelerated) or expensive (if not).

It usually doesn't need much CPU, it just deals with the key/value store (repository) and uses the repository index for that.

borg check: the repository check computes the checksums of all chunks (medium CPU usage) borg delete repo: low CPU usage

When using borg in a client/server way with a <ssh:-type> repo, the ssh processes used for the transport layer will need some CPU on the client and on the server due to the crypto they are doing - esp. if you are pumping big amounts of data.
The chunks index and the files index are read into memory for performance reasons. Might need big amounts of memory (see below). Compression, esp. lzma compression with high levels might need substantial amounts of memory.
The server process will load the repository index into memory. Might need considerable amounts of memory, but less than on the client (see below).
Proportional to the amount of data chunks in your repo. Lots of chunks in your repo imply a big chunks index. It is possible to tweak the chunker params (see create options).
Proportional to the amount of files in your last backups. Can be switched off (see create options), but next backup might be much slower if you do. The speed benefit of using the files cache is proportional to file size.
Proportional to the amount of data chunks in your repo. Lots of chunks in your repo imply a big repository index. It is possible to tweak the chunker params (see create options) to influence the amount of chunks being created.
Reading data and metadata from a FUSE mounted repository will consume up to the size of all deduplicated, small chunks in the repository. Big chunks won't be locally cached.
A non-trivial amount of data will be stored on the remote temp directory for each client that connects to it. For some remotes, this can fill the default temporary directory at /tmp. This can be remediated by ensuring the $TMPDIR, $TEMP, or $TMP environment variable is properly set for the sshd process. For some OSes, this can be done just by setting the correct value in the .bashrc (or equivalent login config file for other shells), however in other cases it may be necessary to first enable PermitUserEnvironment yes in your sshd_config file, then add environment="TMPDIR=/my/big/tmpdir" at the start of the public key to be used in the authorized_hosts file.
Contains the chunks index and files index (plus a collection of single- archive chunk indexes which might need huge amounts of disk space, depending on archive count and size - see FAQ about how to reduce).
If your repository is remote, all deduplicated (and optionally compressed/ encrypted) data of course has to go over the connection (ssh:// repo url). If you use a locally mounted network filesystem, additionally some copy operations used for transaction support also go over the connection. If you back up multiple sources to one target repository, additional traffic happens for cache resynchronization.

Besides regular file and directory structures, Borg can preserve

  • symlinks (stored as symlink, the symlink is not followed)
  • special files:
  • character and block device files (restored via mknod)
  • FIFOs ("named pipes")
  • special file contents can be backed up in --read-special mode. By default the metadata to create them with mknod(2), mkfifo(2) etc. is stored.

  • hardlinked regular files, devices, symlinks, FIFOs (considering all items in the same archive)
  • timestamps in nanosecond precision: mtime, atime, ctime
  • other timestamps: birthtime (on platforms supporting it)
  • permissions:
  • IDs of owning user and owning group
  • names of owning user and owning group (if the IDs can be resolved)
  • Unix Mode/Permissions (u/g/o permissions, suid, sgid, sticky)


On some platforms additional features are supported:

Platform ACLs [5] xattr [6] Flags [7]
Linux Yes Yes Yes [1]
macOS Yes Yes Yes (all)
FreeBSD Yes Yes Yes (all)
OpenBSD n/a n/a Yes (all)
NetBSD n/a No [2] Yes (all)
Solaris and derivatives No [3] No [3] n/a
Windows (cygwin) No [4] No No

Other Unix-like operating systems may work as well, but have not been tested at all.

Note that most of the platform-dependent features also depend on the file system. For example, ntfs-3g on Linux isn't able to convey NTFS ACLs.

[1]
Only "nodump", "immutable", "compressed" and "append" are supported. Feature request #618 for more flags.
[2]
Feature request #1332
[3]
Feature request #1337
[4]
Cygwin tries to map NTFS ACLs to permissions with varying degrees of success.
[5]
The native access control list mechanism of the OS. This normally limits access to non-native ACLs. For example, NTFS ACLs aren't completely accessible on Linux with ntfs-3g.
[6]
extended attributes; key-value pairs attached to a file, mainly used by the OS. This includes resource forks on Mac OS X.
[7]
aka BSD flags. The Linux set of flags [1] is portable across platforms. The BSDs define additional flags.

borg-common(1) for common command line options

borg-repo-create(1), borg-repo-delete(1), borg-repo-list(1), borg-repo-info(1), borg-create(1), borg-mount(1), borg-extract(1), borg-list(1), borg-info(1), borg-delete(1), borg-prune(1), borg-compact(1), borg-recreate(1)

borg-compression(1), borg-patterns(1), borg-placeholders(1)

  • Main web site <https://www.borgbackup.org/>
  • Releases <https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/releases>
  • Changelog <https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/blob/master/docs/changes.rst>
  • GitHub <https://github.com/borgbackup/borg>
  • Security contact <https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/latest/support.html#security-contact>

The Borg Collective

orphan:

2025-01-07