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Restic is far better both in terms of usability and packaging (borgmatic pretty much is a requirement for usability). Have used both extensively, you can argue

Restic is far better both in terms of usability and packaging (borgmatic pretty much is a requirement for usability). Have used both extensively, you can argue that borg can just be scripted instead and is a lot more versitile, but I had a much better experience with restic in terms of setup and forget. I am not scared that restic will break, with borg I did. Also not sure why this was posted, did a new version release or something?

jszymborski 1y ago
I use Vorta, which makes Borg use very easy. https://vorta.borgbase.com/ https://vorta.borgbase.com/
mekster 1y ago
How is the performance for both? Last time I used restic a few years ago, it choked on not so large data set with high memory usage. I read Borg doesn't choke like that.
- homebrewer 1y ago
  Depends on what you consider large; I looked at one of the machines (at random), and it backups about two terabytes of data spread across about a million files. Most of them aren't changing day to day. I ran another backup, and restic rescanned them & created a snapshot in exactly 35 seconds, using ~800 MiB of RAM at peak and about 600 on average. The files are on HDD, and the machine doesn't have a lot of RAM, looking at high I/O wait times and low CPU load overall, I'm pretty sure the bottleneck is in loading filesystem metadata off disk. I wouldn't backup billions of files or petabytes of data with either restic or borg; stick to ZFS for anything of this scale. I don't remember what the initial scan time was (it was many years ago), but it wasn't unreasonable — pretty sure the bottleneck also was in disk I/O.
kmarc 1y ago
> you can argue that borg can just be scripted And that's what I did myself. Organically it grew to ~200 lines, but it sits in the background (created a systemd unit for it, too) and does its job. I also use rclone to store the encrypted backups in an AWS S3 bucket I so much forget about it that sometimes I have to remind myself to test it out if it still works (it does). Original size Compressed size Deduplicated size All archives: 2.20 TB 1.49 TB 52.97 GB
bjoli 1y ago
Pika backup is pretty darn simple.
johng 1y ago
Emborg is also really cool: https://emborg.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://emborg.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

jszymborski 1y ago

I use Vorta, which makes Borg use very easy. https://vorta.borgbase.com/ https://vorta.borgbase.com/

mekster 1y ago

How is the performance for both? Last time I used restic a few years ago, it choked on not so large data set with high memory usage. I read Borg doesn't choke like that.

homebrewer 1y ago
Depends on what you consider large; I looked at one of the machines (at random), and it backups about two terabytes of data spread across about a million files. Most of them aren't changing day to day. I ran another backup, and restic rescanned them & created a snapshot in exactly 35 seconds, using ~800 MiB of RAM at peak and about 600 on average. The files are on HDD, and the machine doesn't have a lot of RAM, looking at high I/O wait times and low CPU load overall, I'm pretty sure the bottleneck is in loading filesystem metadata off disk. I wouldn't backup billions of files or petabytes of data with either restic or borg; stick to ZFS for anything of this scale. I don't remember what the initial scan time was (it was many years ago), but it wasn't unreasonable — pretty sure the bottleneck also was in disk I/O.

kmarc 1y ago

> you can argue that borg can just be scripted And that's what I did myself. Organically it grew to ~200 lines, but it sits in the background (created a systemd unit for it, too) and does its job. I also use rclone to store the encrypted backups in an AWS S3 bucket I so much forget about it that sometimes I have to remind myself to test it out if it still works (it does). Original size Compressed size Deduplicated size All archives: 2.20 TB 1.49 TB 52.97 GB

bjoli 1y ago

Pika backup is pretty darn simple.

johng 1y ago

Emborg is also really cool: https://emborg.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://emborg.readthedocs.io/en/stable/