BorgBackup: Practical, Script-Friendly Backups That Just Work
Some tools try to do everything. BorgBackup doesn’t. It focuses on one thing — backing up your data safely and efficiently — and does it extremely well. No cloud ties, no mystery layers, no nagging GUIs. Just a command-line interface, strong encryption, and solid, repeatable behavior.
If you’re managing Linux or UNIX-like systems and you need backups that won’t waste your storage or break your trust, Borg deserves serious consideration. It’s fast, it’s reliable, and most importantly — it’s predictable.
What Makes Borg Worth Using?
Backups tend to get messy over time — duplications, bloated archives, unclear retention rules. Borg avoids all that by design. It uses content-aware deduplication, so identical chunks are never written more than once. You can run it daily, even hourly, without filling your disk with redundant data. Plus, everything is encrypted and authenticated — end to end — with AES-256 and proper integrity checks.
It’s one of those tools that fades into the background once set up properly — and that’s exactly the point.
Key Features (No Buzzwords, Just Facts)
| Feature | Why It Matters |
| Encryption & authentication | AES-256 with built-in integrity — so you know your backups weren’t tampered with. |
| Content-aware deduplication | Same file? Same chunk? Stored once, no matter how many times it appears. |
| Compression built-in | Choose between LZ4 (fast), Zlib, or Zstandard — tune it to your workload. |
| Snapshot behavior | Every backup feels full, but under the hood it’s just the delta. |
| Preserves metadata | Permissions, symlinks, xattrs, timestamps — all of it. |
| Works over SSH | No need to install a special daemon on the other side. |
| Mountable backups | Want to poke around inside an archive? Mount it as a folder. |
| Pruning policies | Keep what you need: daily, weekly, monthly — the rest gets cleaned up automatically. |
A Quick Look at How It Works
You point Borg at the data you want to protect. It splits it into chunks, checks what’s new, compresses it (if you want), encrypts it, and saves only what’s changed. The result? Your backup looks like a fresh, full copy — but it’s lean under the surface.
Every archive is cryptographically signed, so corruption or tampering won’t go unnoticed. And once it’s running in a script, you can pretty much forget it’s there — until the day you actually need it.
Installing Borg
Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install borgbackup
macOS (Homebrew):
brew install borgbackup
Portable (pip):
pip install borgbackup
Real-World Usage
Initialize an encrypted repo:
borg init –encryption=repokey /mnt/backup/repo
Create a new archive:
borg create /mnt/backup/repo::2025-06-12-home /home/user/
List archives:
borg list /mnt/backup/repo
Mount one as a folder:
borg mount /mnt/backup/repo::2025-06-12-home /mnt/restore
Extract files:
borg extract /mnt/backup/repo::2025-06-12-home home/user/docs/
Prune older backups:
borg prune /mnt/backup/repo –keep-daily=7 –keep-weekly=4 –keep-monthly=3
When Borg Is the Right Call
– You care about encryption, but don’t want to trust some black box to get it right.
– You run automated backups and need them to be repeatable and low-overhead.
– You don’t have infinite disk space, so deduplication actually matters.
– You want to know your backups are safe — and restorable — without guessing.
Final Note
Borg doesn’t try to be flashy. It doesn’t nag or hand-hold. It quietly backs up your system, with a design that reflects real-world usage and a community that knows what it’s doing. If you value tools that stay out of the way and just work — Borg fits that bill.
