Quickly looking at Borg's website (thanks for the heads up - great tool/option) I see it doesn't support iOS or backing up an iOS device.
I assume you're just suggesting it as a general purpose option for general backups on the desktop?
I wonder how efficient Borg would be with this setup.
One thing that irks me about these solutions is that they seem to scan my folders each time they want to backup. Are there tools that are smarter about this? For e.g., while running, they could keep a log of what's changing and only scan those while backing up.
I may have looked at Duplicacy. I'm sure that I looked at one of Duplicacy [1], Duplicati [2], and Duplicity [3]. Whichever one that was, I kept getting it mixed up with the other two when looking for information online, and finally said "screw this" and bought Arq.
I've used it on my macs for years without any issues at all. I switched after Time Machine broke down for the n'th time in a month saying it needed to recreate the backup, and not once in the 3-5 years i've been using it has it every given me any problems with broken repositories, and every integrity check/restore has succeeded.
Arq on Windows is a different beast though. I'm sure it's technically solid, but the UI leaves a lot to be desired. On windows boxes i default to Duplicaty.
Did you mean Duplicacy or Duplicati?
On my servers i use Borg like any sane person would, but the lack of a good client UI makes scheduling backups on a personal computer a lot more work than i'm willing to put in.
I've found arq backup overall slow once you start hitting 0.5TB overall. It's a design issue.
I believe most operating systems have a mechanism for this. E.g. on macOS it's called fsevents, Linux has inotify
For linux servers, borg is great, and me and my companies are happy users.
Rclone simply copies data. If you `sync` `~/Documents` to your remote it will keep an exact copy.
This is a simple backup since you only have one version. Anything deleted, the next time it syncs, gets deleted.
Borg is a backup tool. Versioning is at its core. It does that efficiently by deduplicating file (chunks really) even if they’re not in the same location.
So with Borg, if you create a backup 1 of `~/Documents` today and a backup 2 tomorrow of `~/Documents` you can see both backups and work with each snapshot. The size it takes should be close to the amount of data changed in the whole source.
If you move directories or files inside, rclone has to reupload them. Borg detects but doesn’t have to store it again.
With rclone some remotes have versioning (Google Drive, Dropbox). This could help in this case, but it depends on the remote. With Borg this is built in and you can change the underlying storage and migrate without loosing any data. Using versioning with crypt would probably be a pain too due to the file names. Not sure if rclone has commands/flags to help with this that I simply don’t know about.
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"This is a simple backup since you only have one version. Anything deleted, the next time it syncs, gets deleted."
This is correct. It is widely advised to not consider a "sync" like this a proper backup.
However, for what it's worth, rsync.net does support rclone[1] and because of the ZFS snapshots that are created and maintained[2] in your account, you can just do a dumb sync because the retention is handled by the snapshots.
I am not sure if rclone is really the right tool for plain old cloud backups - I think rclone distinguishes itself for the ability to transfer data between cloud providers.[3]
[1] https://rsync.net/products/rclone.html
[2] ZFS snapshots reside in the .zfs/snapshot directory inside your rsync.net account.
[3] ssh [email protected] rclone file/in/rsync/net/account s3:/some/bucket
The borg website is here:
https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
and a good description of how it works and why you should use it is here:
https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/