Deduplicated, encrypted, authenticated and compressed backups
Project description
What is BorgBackup?
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 backup data. 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 not fully trusted targets.
See the installation manual or, if you have already downloaded Borg, docs/installation.rst to get started with Borg.
Main features
- Space efficient storage
Deduplication based on content-defined chunking is used to reduce the number of bytes stored: each file is split into a number of variable length chunks and only chunks that have never been seen before are added to the repository.
To deduplicate, all the chunks in the same repository are considered, no matter whether they come from different machines, from previous backups, from the same backup or even from the same single file.
Compared to other deduplication approaches, this method does NOT depend on:
file/directory names staying the same: So you can move your stuff around without killing the deduplication, even between machines sharing a repo.
complete files or time stamps staying the same: If a big file changes a little, only a few new chunks need to be stored - this is great for VMs or raw disks.
The absolute position of a data chunk inside a file: Stuff may get shifted and will still be found by the deduplication algorithm.
- Speed
performance critical code (chunking, compression, encryption) is implemented in C/Cython
local caching of files/chunks index data
quick detection of unmodified files
- Data encryption
All data can be protected using 256-bit AES encryption, data integrity and authenticity is verified using HMAC-SHA256. Data is encrypted clientside.
- Compression
All data can be compressed by lz4 (super fast, low compression), zlib (medium speed and compression) or lzma (low speed, high compression).
- Off-site backups
Borg can store data on any remote host accessible over SSH. If Borg is installed on the remote host, big performance gains can be achieved compared to using a network filesystem (sshfs, nfs, …).
- Backups mountable as filesystems
Backup archives are mountable as userspace filesystems for easy interactive backup examination and restores (e.g. by using a regular file manager).
- Easy installation on multiple platforms
We offer single-file binaries that do not require installing anything - you can just run them on these platforms:
Linux
Mac OS X
FreeBSD
OpenBSD and NetBSD (no xattrs/ACLs support or binaries yet)
Cygwin (not supported, no binaries yet)
- Free and Open Source Software
security and functionality can be audited independently
licensed under the BSD (3-clause) license
Easy to use
Initialize a new backup repository and create a backup archive:
$ borg init /mnt/backup $ borg create /mnt/backup::Monday ~/Documents
Now doing another backup, just to show off the great deduplication:
$ borg create --stats -C zlib,6 /mnt/backup::Tuesday ~/Documents
Archive name: Tuesday
Archive fingerprint: 387a5e3f9b0e792e91c...
Start time: Tue Mar 25 12:00:10 2014
End time: Tue Mar 25 12:00:10 2014
Duration: 0.08 seconds
Number of files: 358
Original size Compressed size Deduplicated size
This archive: 57.16 MB 46.78 MB 151.67 kB <--- !
All archives: 114.02 MB 93.46 MB 44.81 MB
For a graphical frontend refer to our complementary project BorgWeb.
Links
Notes
Borg is a fork of Attic and maintained by “The Borg collective”.
Differences between Attic and Borg
Here’s a (incomplete) list of some major changes:
more open, faster paced development (see issue #1)
lots of attic issues fixed (see issue #5)
less chunk management overhead via –chunker-params option (less memory and disk usage)
faster remote cache resync (useful when backing up multiple machines into same repo)
compression: no, lz4, zlib or lzma compression, adjustable compression levels
repokey replaces problematic passphrase mode (you can’t change the passphrase nor the pbkdf2 iteration count in “passphrase” mode)
simple sparse file support, great for virtual machine disk files
can read special files (e.g. block devices) or from stdin, write to stdout
mkdir-based locking is more compatible than attic’s posix locking
uses fadvise to not spoil / blow up the fs cache
better error messages / exception handling
better logging, screen output, progress indication
tested on misc. Linux systems, 32 and 64bit, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X
Please read the ChangeLog (or CHANGES.rst in the source distribution) for more information.
BORG IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH ORIGINAL ATTIC (but there is a one-way conversion).
EXPECT THAT WE WILL BREAK COMPATIBILITY REPEATEDLY WHEN MAJOR RELEASE NUMBER CHANGES (like when going from 0.x.y to 1.0.0).
NOT RELEASED DEVELOPMENT VERSIONS HAVE UNKNOWN COMPATIBILITY PROPERTIES.
THIS IS SOFTWARE IN DEVELOPMENT, DECIDE YOURSELF WHETHER IT FITS YOUR NEEDS.
Borg is distributed under a 3-clause BSD license, see License for the complete license.
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