1
REMOTE STORAGE
Since Borg is only interested in changes since your last
backup, the entire process is fast and efficient. Even better,
Borg also supports compression, which further limits the amount
of disk space taken up by backups. Finally, Borg also supports
client-side encryption, so you can safely encrypt backups before
they are transmitted to remote storage locations. Apart from all
that, Borg backups can be mounted as a file system. This means
that you can use a file manager to examine the contents of the
backup and restore only specific files.
2
THE BORG ARE GOOD!
No self-respecting Trekkie ever thought of Borg as
good, but here at Maximum PC, we are pleased to break
the mold. You can gauge the popularity of Borg from the fact
that it’s available in the software repositories of most popular
desktop distributions. The project’s website, however, cautions
that the repositories might not always carry the latest version.
Thankfully, the current release, version 1 .1.17, is available in
most popular distributions such as Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian,
Mageia, Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and others.
>> The project’s website has a list of distributions
and the version in their repositories. Run the sudo
pacman - S borg command to install BorgBackup on
Arch or Mageia. You can similarly run the dnf install
borgbackup command to install it on Fedora.
>> As expected, the project has a long list of
dependencies, so if you decide to compile it from source,
please carefully follow the installation instructions on
the website. This thorough focus on installation makes
Borg one of the best-documented command-line tools
we’ve encountered.
>> The first step is to create a backup repository. You
can think of a repository as a file system that’s home to
all the data you wish to backup. You can place data from
different directories into a repository. Borg is able to
identify files, even if the names or location changes. For
example, if file A in location X is already in the repository,
when you attempt to backup file B from location Y Borg
uses chunking to determine if file B is indeed a new file.
>> Borg has various sub-commands, such as create ,
init and so on, and each has its own set of arguments.
Thankfully, you can access help using the borg
command - -help command, or from the website.
MOST BACKUP STRATEGIES lead to a lot of wasted space because you invariably end up making
copies of the same data over and over again. In essence, data deduplication is the process of
comparing chunks of data that have already been backed up, filtering out duplicated data, and
retaining only a single unique copy, thereby saving disk space. When deployed as a data backup
strategy, this means that only changes since the last backup are stored.
Backup tools for Linux are as prolific as browsers, video players, or even text editors.
BorgBackup, or just Borg, is a deduplicating backup utility—released under the BSD license, the
project was forked from Attic, a popular backup utility, in 2015. Thanks to the data deduplication
technique, Borg is suitable as an everyday home or even enterprise backup solution, with a host
of features that make it a breeze to use. – SHASHANK SHARMA
YOU’LL NEED THIS
SUITABLE LINUX OS
SSD/HDD with unused space.
To create a repository, you must run the borg init
PATH command. The project recommends that you
use encryption to safeguard your data. Use the - e none
option if you don’t wish to use encryption. Alternatively,
you can choose between using a passphrase only, or
passphrase and key encryption.
>> The borg init - epasskey /path/to/repository
command will prompt you to enter a passphrase. The
repository created with the init command will be
protected by the passphrase. You will not be able to
access the repository, add backup files to it, or restore
data from it without the passphrase.
3
LEARN TO LIVE WITH THE BORG
Once a repository is created, Borg is now ready
to accept files. Each backup is stored in a unique
archive within the repository. You can create many
repositories and archives with Borg.
>> For instance, you could create a repository to
backup PDF files from work, and another repository to
backup music sheets. You must use the borg create /
©^
BO
RG
>> The borg init command is used to initialize an empty repository.
In this example, we’ve created a repository called repo in the ~/
Documents/temp directory.
64 MAXIMUMPC HOL 2021
R&D
