[jjice]

For personal use, at what point would one recommend using Borg over a regular rsync?

I currently use rsync to backup up a set of directories on a drive to another drive and a remote service (rsync.net). It's been working great, but I'm not sure if my use-case is just simple enough where this is a good solution, or if I'm missing a big benefit of Borg. I do envy Borg's encryption, but the complexity of a new tool tied with the paranoia of me maybe screwing up all my data has had me on edge a bit to make the leap. I don't have a ton of data to backup, say about 5TB at the moment.

[zimpenfish]

For me, the deduping and compression saves a lot of storage. My mail backup (17 backups covering the last 6 months) is originally 837GB, compressed to 312GB and dedupe'd to 19GB. Same with Postgres - 25GB to 7GB to 900MB.

You could probably use rsync's hard linking to save space on the mail backup but I'm not sure you'd get it as small without faffing about.

[remram]

Usual problem, if you delete/corrupt a file and find out two days later, your daily backup is not going to help you. Having more than one snapshot is very valuable.

http://www.taobackup.com/ etc

Rsync is also very slow with lots of files, and doesn't deal with renamed files (will transfer again).

[eikenberry]

Rsync backups can be setup to deal with this. I have rsync setup with daily incremental backups, the main sync to a 'current' folder and the old version of changed files staying in a weekday named folder (eg. Monday). So I have a rotating 7 day period to recover files. On top of that I have a monthly long term backup of the last old version of that month. This provides an arbitraribly long monthly window to recover from. Rsync is very versatile.

[remram]

Yeah with enough scripting, you can rebuild a slow equivalent to a real backup program, that will also use 10x the disk space.

[eikenberry]

Yep. But it works and has worked for over 20 years. Various backup software has come and gone in that time but rsync has been a rock.

[leetnewb]

Fwiw, Borg is coming up on 10. 12 if you include the project it forked from. I like the simplicity of rsync approaches, but Borg seems to have longevity and widespread use.

[eikenberry]

Restic is also around 10 years old... at least based on it's github commit history. I should probably look at them again at some point. Hard to get motivated to replace a working system for some disk space.

[ibizaman]

With rsync, you’re replicating only the last state. With borg, you can see all backups being made and rollback to any previous snapshot. This is true of a lot of backup solutions btw.

Concretely, if you inadvertently delete a file and this get rsynced, you cannot use the backup to restore that file. With borg you can.