[puffybuf]

I'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]

Does 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]

I 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

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.