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BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore
- LeoPanthera 1y agoIs that a big deal? You should probably be doing this with zfs immutable snapshots anyway. Or equivalent feature for your filesystem.
- topato 1y agoI'm also completely confused why this was at the top of my hacki, seems completely innocuous
- ajb 1y agoIdeally a backup system should be implementable in such a way that no credential on the machines being backed up, enable the deletion or modification of existing backups. That's so that if your machines are hacked a) the backups can't be deleted or encrypted in a ransom attack and b) If you can figure out when the first compromise occurred, you know that before that date the backup data is not compromised. I guess some people might have been relying on this feature of borgbackup to implement that requirement
- philsnow 1y agoThe purpose of the append-only feature of borgbackup is to prevent an attacker from being able to overwrite your existing backups if they compromise the device being backed up. Are you talking about using ZFS snapshots on the remote backup target? Trying to solve the same problem with local snapshots wouldn't work because the attack presumes that the device that's sending the backups is compromised.
- LeoPanthera 1y ago> Are you talking about using ZFS snapshots on the remote backup target? Yes.
- homebrewer 1y agoThere's not much sense in using these advanced backup tools if you're already on ZFS, even if it's just on the backup server, I would stick with something simpler. Their whole point is in reliable checksums, incremental backups, deduplication, snapshotting on top of a 'simple' classical filesystem. Sounds familiar to any ZFS user?
- nijave 1y agoDedupe is efficient in Borg. The target needs almost no RAM
- globular-toast 1y agoAre there any good options for an off-site zfs backup server besides a colo? Would be interested to know what others have set up as I'm not really happy with how I do it. I have zfs on my NAS running locally. I backup to that from my PC via rsync triggered by anacron daily. From my NAS I use rclone to send encrypted backups to Backblaze. I'd be happier with something more frequent from PC to NAS. Syncthing maybe? Then just do zfs sync to some off site zfs server.
- gaadd33 1y agoI think Rsync.net supports zfs send/receive
- aeadio 1y agoAside from rsync.net which was mentioned in a sibling comment, there’s also https://zfs.rent https://zfs.rent, or any VPS with Linux or FreeBSD installed.
- globular-toast 1y agozfs.rent is in the wrong location and I can't see anything about zfs send/receive support on rsync.net. What kind of VPS product has multiple redundant disks attached? Aren't they usually provided with virtual storage?
- aborsy 1y agoBorg2 has been in beta testing for a very long time. Anyone knows when will it come out of beta?
- ThomasWaldmann 1y agoThe usual answer: "when it is ready". For low-latency storage (like file: and maybe ssh:) it already works quite nicely, but there might be a lot to do still for high-latency storage (like cloud stuff).
- dawnerd 1y agoIt’s a shame because the current version has had bugs that v2 supposedly fixed for a while.
- ThomasWaldmann 1y agoBugs? I don't know about any show-stoppers in borg 1.x. Design limitations? Yes, there are some, that's why borg2 will be quite different. But these are no easy or small changes. Also, borg2 will be a breaking release (offering borg transfer to copy existing archives from borg 1.x repos). It takes long because we try to put all breaking changes into borg2, so you won't have to transfer again too soon after borg2 release.
- dawnerd 1y agoNothing really breaking but annoying, but I suppose you wouldn't even consider it a bug then. For example, the file changed warning. That one ended up breaking my backup cron. I wasn't being notified (my fault there) and the rsync wasn't running. Caught it months later when I tried to run a test restore. I'm fine with it returning a warning but people were asking for an option to suppress it and you said in 2022 it would be fixed in v2. That's why it's disappointing. Appreciate the work though! Borg has definitely been a life safer and has recovered a failed production server already.
- mrtesthah 1y agoFYI for those using restic, you can use rest-server to achieve a server-side-enforced append-only setup. The purpose is to protect against ransomware and other malicious client-side operations.
- homebrewer 1y agoFor anyone looking to migrate off borg because of this, append-only is available in restic, but only with the rest-server backend: https://github.com/restic/restic https://github.com/restic/restic https://github.com/restic/rest-server https://github.com/restic/rest-server which has to be started with --append-only. I use this systemd unit: [Unit] After=network-online.target [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target [Service] ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/rest-server --path /mnt/backups --append-only --private-repos WorkingDirectory=/mnt/backups User=restic Restart=on-failure ProtectSystem=strict ReadWritePaths=/mnt/backups I also use nginx with HTTPS + HTTP authentication in front of it, with a separate username/password combination for each server. This makes rest-server completely inaccessible to the rest of the internet and you don't have to trust it to be properly protected against being hammered by malicious traffic. Been using this for about five years, it saved my bacon a few times, no problems so far.
- champtar 1y agoIf you want to use some object storage instead of local disk, rclone can be a restic server: https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_restic/ https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_restic/
- rsync 1y agoYou can achieve append-only without exposing a rest server provided that 'rclone' can be called on the remote end: rclone serve restic --stdio You add something like this to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys: restrict,command="rclone serve restic --stdio --append-only backups/my-restic-repo" ssh-rsa ... ... and then run a command like this: ssh user@rsync.net rclone serve restic --stdio ... We just started deploying this on rsync.net servers - which is to say, we maintain an arguments allowlist for every binary you can execute here and we never allowed 'rclone serve' ... but now we do, IFF it is accompanied by --stdio.
- zacwest 1y agoYou then use `restic` telling it to use rclone like... restic ... --option=rclone.program="ssh -i <identity> user@host" --repo=rclone: which has it use the rclone backend over ssh. I've been doing this on rsync.net since at least February; works great!
- dblitt 1y agoIt seems the suggested solution is to use server credentials that lack delete permissions (and use credentials that have delete for compacting the repo), but does that protect against a compromised client simply overriding files without deleting them?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- qeternity 1y agoAppend-only would imply yes. There is no overwriting in append-only. There is only truncate and append.
- mosselman 1y agoYou have misread I think. There used to be append-only, they've removed it and suggest using a credential that has no 'delete' permission. The question asked here is whether this would protect against data being overwritten instead of deleted.
- ThomasWaldmann 1y agoYes, it also disallows overwriting.
- throwaway984393 1y agoNo. Delete and overwrite are different. You need overwrite protection in addition to delete protection. The solution will vary depending on the storage system and the use case. (The comment in the PR is not an exhaustive description of potential solutions)
- ThomasWaldmann 1y agono-delete disallows any kind of deleting information, that includes object deletion and object overwriting.
- TheFreim 1y agoI've been using Borg for a while, I've been thinking about looking at the backup utility space again to see what is out there. What backup utilities do you all use and recommend?
- TiredOfLife 1y agoKopia
- conception 1y agoKopia is surprisingly good. I use it with a b2 backend, had percentage based restore verification for regulatory items and is super fast. Only downside is lack of enterprise features/centralized management.
- Saris 1y agoRestic is nice. Backrest if you like a webUI.
- singhrac 1y agoI spent too long looking into this and settled on restic. I'm satisfied with the performance for our large repo and datasets, though we'll probably supplement it with filesystem-based backups at some point. Borg has the issue that it is in limbo, i.e. all the new features (including object storage support) are in Borg2, but there's no clear date when that will be stable. I also did not like that it was written in Python, because backups are not always IO blocked (we have some very large directories, etc.). I really liked borgmatic on Borg, but we found resticprofile which is pretty much the same thing (it is underdiscussed). After some testing I think it is important to set GOGC and read-concurrency parameters, as a tip. All the GUIs are very ugly, but we're fine a CLI. If rustic matures enough and is worth a switch we might consider it.
- muppetman 1y agorestic Single binary, well supported, dedup, compression, excellent snapshots, can mount a backup to restore a single file easily etc etc. It's made my backups go from being a chore to being a joy.
- seymon 1y agoBorg vs Restic vs Kopia ? They are so similar in features. How do they compare? Which to choose?
- aborsy 1y agoRestic is the winner. It talks directly to many backends, is a static binary (so you can drop the executable in operating systems which don’t allow package installation like a NAS OS) and has a clean CLI. Kopia is a bit newer and less tested. All three have a lot of commands to work with repositories. Each one of them is much better than closed source proprietary backup software that I have dealt with, like Synology hyperbackup nonsense. If you want a better solution, the next level is ZFS.
- seymon 1y agoI am already using zfs on my NAS where I want my backups to be. But I didn't consider it for backups till now
- aeadio 1y agoYou can consider something like syncthing to get the important files onto your NAS, and then use ZFS snapshots and replication via syncoid/sanoid to do the actual backing up.
- aborsy 1y agoOr install ZFS also on end devices, and do ZFS replication to NAS, which is what I do. I have ZFS on my laptop, snapshot data every 30 minutes, and replicate them. Those snapshots are very useful, as sometimes I accidentally delete data. With ZFS, all file system is replicated. The backup will be consistent, which is not the case with file level backup. With latter, you have to also worry about lock files, permissions, etc. The restore will be more natural and quick with ZFS.
- fc417fc802 1y ago
- jbverschoor 1y agoMoved to duplicacy. Works great for me
- jbverschoor 1y agoNot to be confused with duplicati or duplicity
- jkl1337 1y agohttps://github.com/dupluxy/dupluxy https://github.com/dupluxy/dupluxy Also, if anyone cares about preserving hardlinks and overlay2 directories, fileflags without loss of metadata. The binary is a drop in.
- neilv 1y agoI used to have a BorgBackup server at home that used append-only and restricted-SSH. It wasn't perfect, but it did protect against some scenarios in which a device could be majorly messed up, yet the server was more resistant to losing the data. For work, the backup schemes include separate additional protection of the data server or media, so append-only added to that would be nice, as redundant protection, but not as necessary.
- nathants 1y agoDo something simpler. Backups shouldn’t be complex. This should be simpler still: https://github.com/nathants/backup https://github.com/nathants/backup
- yread 1y agoUh, who has the money to store backups in AWS?!
- nathants 1y agoDepends how big they are. My high value backups go into S3, R2, and a local x3 disk mirror[1]. My low value backups go into a cheap usb hdd from Best Buy. 1. https://github.com/nathants/mirror https://github.com/nathants/mirror
- seized 1y agoGlacier Deep Archive is the cheapest cloud backup option at $1USD/month/TB. Google Cloud Store Archive Tier is a tiny bit more.
- mananaysiempre 1y agoBoth would be pretty expensive to actually restore from, though, IIRC.
- fc417fc802 1y agoQuite expensive, but it should only ever be a last resort after your local backups have all failed in some way or another. For $1/mo/TB you purchase the opportunity to pay an exorbitant amount to recover from an otherwise catastrophic situation.
- Ferret7446 1y agoIf you don't test your backups, they don't exist.
- puffybuf 1y agoI've been using device mapper+encryption to backup my files to encrypted filesystem on regular files. (cryptsetup on linux, vnconfig+bioctl on openbsd). Is there a reason for me to use borgbackup? Maybe to save space? I even wrote python scripts to automatically cleanup and unmount if something goes wrong (not enough space etc). On openbsd I can even Double encrypt with blowfish(vnconfig -K) and then a diff alg for bioctl.
- anyfoo 1y agoDoes your solution do incremental backups at all? I have backups going back years, because through incremental backups each delta is not very large. Every once in a while things gets sparsed out, so that for example I have daily backups for the recent past, but only monthly and then even yearly for further back.
- hcartiaux 1y agoI maintain my incremental backups and handle the rotation with a shell script (bontmia) based on rsync with `--link-dest` (it creates hard links for unchanged files from the last backup). I've been using this on top of cryptsetup/luks/ext4 or xfs for > 10 years. Bonus: the backups are readable without any specific tools, you don't have to be able to reinstall a backup software to restore files, which may or may not be difficult in 10 years. This is the tool I use: https://github.com/hcartiaux/bontmia https://github.com/hcartiaux/bontmia It's forked from an old project which is not online anymore, I've fixed a few bugs and cleaned the code over the years.
- gausswho 1y agoMy current approach is restic, but I'd prefer to have asymmetric passwords, essentially the backup machine only having write access (while maintaining deduplication). This way if the backup machine were compromised, and therefore the password it needs to write, the backup repo itself would still be secure since it would use a different password for reading. Is this what append-only achieved for Borg?
- antoniomika 1y agoThis has been replaced with a permissions feature that still provides both delete and overwrite protections. The difference is the underlying store needs to implement it rather than running a server that understands the permission differences. You can read more about this change here: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/8823#issuecomment-2903505285 https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/8823#issuecomment-...
- bayindirh 1y agoThis comment needs to be pinned, alongside what the developers say [0] since the change is very misunderstood. > The "no-delete" permission disallows deleting objects as well as overwriting existing objects. [0]: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8798#issuecomment-2953095208 https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8798#issuecomment-29...
- zargon 1y agoIsn't this "no-delete permission" just a made-up mode for testing the borg storage layer while simulating a lack of permissions for deleting and overwriting? In actual deployment, whatever backing store is used must have the access control primitives to implement such a restriction. I don't know how to do this on a posix filesystem, for example. Gemini gave me a convoluted solution that requires the client to change permissions after creating the files.
- antoniomika 1y agoCurrently, you can either provide the `BORG_REPO_PERMISSIONS` env var to borg [0] or `--permissions` flag to `borg serve` [1]. You can then enforce this as part of your `authorized_keys` command, for example. [0] https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/blob/3cf8d7cf2f36246ded75de3ddaa4d2ea8191a53e/src/borg/repository.py#L127 https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/blob/3cf8d7cf2f36246ded75... [1] https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/blob/3cf8d7cf2f36246ded75de3ddaa4d2ea8191a53e/src/borg/archiver/serve_cmd.py#L75 https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/blob/3cf8d7cf2f36246ded75...
- 3036e4 1y agoI use rsync.net for borg backups. They create daily ZFS snapshots that are read-only to the user, specifically for ransomware protection. But this was a good reminder I should probably figure out some good way to monitor my borg repo for unintended changes. Having snapshots to roll back to is only useful if a problem is detected in time.
- radarsat1 1y agoI've been using btrbk with a local linux machine i use as a file server. Works well for incremental snapshot backups, no need to "unthaw" an image, I can directly fetch files from a previous snapshot. The only thing I haven't figured out with btrfs is how to efficiently handle incremental backs to S3. I guess there's not much choice than to use image diffs using btrfs-send because you don't have hard/ref links. But I don't like this because then if i want to retrieve a file from some version I'd have to have an extra 30 TB free to install the base image and progressively all the diffs up to the point I want to retrieve, seems a lot harder. So to make this reasonable I'd have to choose to make periodic non-incremental base images, starts getting complicated.
- ThomasWaldmann 1y agoborgbackup developer here: TL;DR: don't panic, all is good. :-) Longer version: - borg 1.x style “append-only” was removed, because it heavily depended on how the 1.x storage worked (it was a transactional log, always only appending PUT/DEL/COMMIT entries to segment files - except when compacting segments [then it also deleted segment files after appending their non-deleted entries to new segments]) - borg 2 storage (based on borgstore) does not work like that anymore (for good reasons), there is no “appending”. thus “—append-only” would be a misnomer. - master branch (future borg 2 beta) has “borg serve —permissions=…” (and BORG_PERMISSIONS env var) so one can restrict permissions: “all”, “no-delete”, “write-only”, “read-only” offer more functionality than “append only” ever had. “no-delete” disallows data deleting as well as data overwriting. - restricting permissions in a store on a server requires server/store side enforced permission control. “borg serve” implements that (using the borgstore posixfs backend), but it could be also implemented by configuring a different kind of store accordingly (like some cloud storage). it’s hard to test that with all sorts of cloud storage providers though, so implementing it in the much easier to automatically test posixfs was also a motivation to add the permissions code. Links: - docs: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8906/files https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8906/files - code: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8893/files https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8893/files - code: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8844/files https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8844/files - code: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8837/files https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8837/files Please upvote, so people don't get confused.
- nadir_ishiguro 1y agoThank you for borg