BorgBackup
Deduplicating, compressed, authenticated-encryption archives — the conservative choice for a backup repository.
What it does
borg create writes an archive into a repository, chunking and deduplicating as it goes, so the hundredth archive of the same tree adds only what changed. Archives can be mounted with FUSE and browsed like a directory, which makes restores unremarkable.
borg init --encryption=repokey-blake2 nas:/backups/laptop
borg create --stats --compression zstd nas:/backups/laptop::{now} ~/Documents
borg mount nas:/backups/laptop::latest /tmp/borgmountNotes
- Needs Borg installed on both ends for a remote repository, which rules out plain object storage. Borgbase and rsync.net exist for exactly that reason.
- Mounting archives needs a FUSE implementation — see macFUSE.
- One repository is written by one client at a time. Concurrent hosts want separate repositories.
Alternative to
| Alternative | Type | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| restic | Open source | Talks to object storage directly; no daemon needed on the far end |
| Kopia | Open source | GUI and policies included, and it does speak S3 |
| Duplicity | Open source | Older, incremental rather than deduplicating, GnuPG-based |
| Arq | Paid | The same guarantees with a scheduler and a licence |
Install
brew install borgbackup