Borg - bakkeby/dusk GitHub Wiki
Borg is a backup solution that I discovered a few years ago that is truly amazing.
If you are interested then I would recommend having a look through the demo videos here:
There are many reasons why Borg checks all boxes for me; here are a few of them.
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Contrary to many other backup solution tools you can set up and operate Borg from the command line rather than having to rely on a GUI. This also means that some things can be scripted.
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It is an incremental backup, as in only that what is changed is backed up when a backup runs - as opposed to solutions that copy everything every time. But, each backup is tracked as if everything was copied every time. This is referred to as being a deduplicating archiver. In practice this means that older backups can be removed (purged) without affecting other backups.
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Backups are compressed. There is also an option for encrypting the backup.
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Backups can be local, as in backing up to an external drive, but they can also be on a remote server. This allows me to back up to a NAS.
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Backups can be mounted as a FUSE filesystem. This means that I can mount a backup from two months ago and use find, apply greps, do diffs, etc. just as I do with local directories. More so, because I back up all my computers this way I can mount and access files on my laptop even if it is not on.
Below is my backup script as well as a dmenu script that I use if I need to inspect something or mount a backup. Neither of these will be usable out of the box as it depends on what is archived and how, but I am including the scripts as examples for how it can be done:
Back to Other scripts and life hacks.