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Does anyone know how it compares to Restic? That's what I've been using and have been pretty pleased. It seems like the main difference is that restic supports

Does anyone know how it compares to Restic? That's what I've been using and have been pretty pleased. It seems like the main difference is that restic supports integrations with other services, whereas Borg seems uses SSH for its connections

marceloneil 8y ago
Borg is also big on deduplication
- mrighele 8y ago
  Deduplication is one the things that drove me to Borg: it has the speed and space saving of an incremental backup but every single backup can be used as it was a full backup. It is also very easy to setup a pruning policy for old backups, so that you can say that you want to keep one backup per day for 90 days and after that only one backup per month for 2 years.
  - bloopernova 8y ago
    The dedupe in Borg is downright magical. I know I lose some space by keeping my hosts in separate repositories, but even then, I get insane space savings.
StavrosK 8y ago
Restic looks pretty interesting, I wasn't aware of it, thank you. I don't know how Restic can achieve its goals, since AFAIK you need a binary running on the server to diff/check data/verify restores/etc without transferring all that over the network. Borg runs a binary on the server to do this, that's why it can't easily back up to S3 et al.
- johntash 8y ago
  IIRC Restic keeps indexes of data it uploads to configured backends. I think it caches that index locally, but it can also download it from the remote backend to compare.
johntash 8y ago
I've used both Borg and Restic pretty heavily. I settled on Restic because it was much lighter on resources. A few of the servers I manage have small amounts of ram, but large amounts of data. Borg would often get oom-killed, but Restic wouldn't. Restic also starts uploading changes as soon as it sees them, whereas borg has to scan the entire list of files before it starts uploading changes. Unfortunately for multi-tb datasets with millions of files, borg would take hours just to scan all of the files. Pruning old archives also worked a lot better in Restic compared to Borg. If you're happy with Restic, I'd keep sticking with it.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  Interesting. I had deployed restic to my fleet of 100 servers around a year ago to backup to a common Backblaze B2 destination, and rolled it back after running into a production service getting OOM killed because of restic memory use.
  - johntash 8y ago
    That's interesting, did you have a lot of small files or large files? I don't know if it's an option for you, but have you considered something like rsync from each server to a central backup server and then running restic/borg/whatever on that server? Sometimes that works out nicely too, and would be less impactful to other services on the machine. What did you switch to instead of restic, if you don't mind me asking?
JoshTriplett 8y ago
I've been quite happy with Restic, doing always-incremental encrypted backups to S3.
TheWiseOne 8y ago
Restic also works on Windows, whereas Borg doesn't (yet), if that's a consideration.
- spasche 8y ago
  I use it on Windows via the Linux Subsystem of Windows 10. It's not a pure native solution, but it works quite well for me.
  - BeeOnRope 8y ago
    Is "it" Borg or Restic here?
    - spasche 8y ago
      it = Borg
- ZoomZoomZoom 8y ago
  It works very well under Cygwin, so no problem, if you can install that.
spasche 8y ago
One big disadvantage of restic at the moment is that it doesn't do compression (https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/21 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/21). I was using restic and switched to borg because of that and could save hundreds of gigabytes.
- mholt 8y ago
  IMO compression in backups is overrated. (I run Relica, a backup service built atop restic: https://relicabackup.com https://relicabackup.com) Most large files are already in compressed formats: mp4, zip, tgz, jpg, etc. What you _really_ want is deduplication (which restic does), so that chunks are only stored once, even if multiple machines sharing some data back up to the same repo. Dedup saves me about 30% per backup repo in my own experience. Not saying compression wouldn't be nice (to have done properly, it is somewhat at odds with encryption), but I'm just saying I don't think it's worth making it a #1 deciding factor.
  - johntash 8y ago
    I agree that compression is overrated for most backups. It'd help with a lot of text-oriented data, but honestly that takes up so little space compared to a vm image or something like that. If I was backing up a single computer, compression would matter more to me. But if I'm backing up 10s or 100s of servers, there's going to be a lot of duplicated data that would make a much bigger difference.
- ekovarski 8y ago
  You can always back up onto a compression enabled file system to further save space + dedupe with rustic. Borg is a fantastic tool but the time it takes to start and parse the files req on a large system negates the benefits of compression for me unfortunately.
  - rakoo 8y ago
    Encryption totally defeats any raw compression. It would need to be inside the blobs themselves.

marceloneil 8y ago

Borg is also big on deduplication

mrighele 8y ago
Deduplication is one the things that drove me to Borg: it has the speed and space saving of an incremental backup but every single backup can be used as it was a full backup. It is also very easy to setup a pruning policy for old backups, so that you can say that you want to keep one backup per day for 90 days and after that only one backup per month for 2 years.
- bloopernova 8y ago
  The dedupe in Borg is downright magical. I know I lose some space by keeping my hosts in separate repositories, but even then, I get insane space savings.

StavrosK 8y ago

Restic looks pretty interesting, I wasn't aware of it, thank you. I don't know how Restic can achieve its goals, since AFAIK you need a binary running on the server to diff/check data/verify restores/etc without transferring all that over the network. Borg runs a binary on the server to do this, that's why it can't easily back up to S3 et al.

johntash 8y ago
IIRC Restic keeps indexes of data it uploads to configured backends. I think it caches that index locally, but it can also download it from the remote backend to compare.

johntash 8y ago

I've used both Borg and Restic pretty heavily. I settled on Restic because it was much lighter on resources. A few of the servers I manage have small amounts of ram, but large amounts of data. Borg would often get oom-killed, but Restic wouldn't. Restic also starts uploading changes as soon as it sees them, whereas borg has to scan the entire list of files before it starts uploading changes. Unfortunately for multi-tb datasets with millions of files, borg would take hours just to scan all of the files. Pruning old archives also worked a lot better in Restic compared to Borg. If you're happy with Restic, I'd keep sticking with it.

linsomniac 8y ago
Interesting. I had deployed restic to my fleet of 100 servers around a year ago to backup to a common Backblaze B2 destination, and rolled it back after running into a production service getting OOM killed because of restic memory use.
- johntash 8y ago
  That's interesting, did you have a lot of small files or large files? I don't know if it's an option for you, but have you considered something like rsync from each server to a central backup server and then running restic/borg/whatever on that server? Sometimes that works out nicely too, and would be less impactful to other services on the machine. What did you switch to instead of restic, if you don't mind me asking?

JoshTriplett 8y ago

I've been quite happy with Restic, doing always-incremental encrypted backups to S3.

TheWiseOne 8y ago

Restic also works on Windows, whereas Borg doesn't (yet), if that's a consideration.

spasche 8y ago
I use it on Windows via the Linux Subsystem of Windows 10. It's not a pure native solution, but it works quite well for me.
- BeeOnRope 8y ago
  Is "it" Borg or Restic here?
  - spasche 8y ago
    it = Borg
ZoomZoomZoom 8y ago
It works very well under Cygwin, so no problem, if you can install that.

spasche 8y ago

One big disadvantage of restic at the moment is that it doesn't do compression (https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/21 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/21). I was using restic and switched to borg because of that and could save hundreds of gigabytes.

mholt 8y ago
IMO compression in backups is overrated. (I run Relica, a backup service built atop restic: https://relicabackup.com https://relicabackup.com) Most large files are already in compressed formats: mp4, zip, tgz, jpg, etc. What you _really_ want is deduplication (which restic does), so that chunks are only stored once, even if multiple machines sharing some data back up to the same repo. Dedup saves me about 30% per backup repo in my own experience. Not saying compression wouldn't be nice (to have done properly, it is somewhat at odds with encryption), but I'm just saying I don't think it's worth making it a #1 deciding factor.
- johntash 8y ago
  I agree that compression is overrated for most backups. It'd help with a lot of text-oriented data, but honestly that takes up so little space compared to a vm image or something like that. If I was backing up a single computer, compression would matter more to me. But if I'm backing up 10s or 100s of servers, there's going to be a lot of duplicated data that would make a much bigger difference.
ekovarski 8y ago
You can always back up onto a compression enabled file system to further save space + dedupe with rustic. Borg is a fantastic tool but the time it takes to start and parse the files req on a large system negates the benefits of compression for me unfortunately.
- rakoo 8y ago
  Encryption totally defeats any raw compression. It would need to be inside the blobs themselves.