Hello there,
Once again I would love your opinions and advice, if possible.
I am thinking in change rsync for Borg/Vorta, trying to improve my backup routine as well as to make it easier to maintain and test. Testing and pruning, moreover, is something I would like to implement better.
I thought first in Borg, but using its frontend Vorta. Anyone uses this set and could share his impressions?
Thanks in advance.
I use borg. It is great.
It is a legit de-duplicating backup solution. It is also highly mature and stable.
I don’t use Vorta(although I am sure that is fine). I use borgmatic which is easy to setup and handles all the automation, retention/pruning and verification for you.
Oh, that’s really great to know! 
Thank you!
I am just worried (and maybe I shouldn’t be) that for local backups, for example, I cannot browse backed up files and folders without using Borg / Vorta, as I am able today with my rsync backups.
Maybe I also need to learn a bit about the de-duplicating thing, because I am very accustomed with incremental, full backups, etc.
IMO, deduplicated is the way to go. Basically, all your backups are full backups. However, since they are deduplicated against all the other data, only the changed data consumes space.
Hum, very interesting. Good to know!
Now I just have to decide between borgmatic or Vorta.
Hi again, @dalto ,
So, sorry for asking this again. But I was wondering if I am only allowed to browse files and folders through Borg itself. I cannot browse all of that “outside” the tool, right? I mean, using a file manager, for example, to browse the repository?
Yes and no.
You need borg to access the data because the files are embedded in the repository.
However, you can borg mount any backup and then browse it with your file manager.
Ah, I understood. Really amazing. Installing right now.
Thank you so much.
I’ve been using Vorta for a while now and it is really awesome. I would highly recommend it.
Thanks a lot. I’ll check it out.
Borg is great, never used vorta just used it from the command line. Right now I’m using restic which also works great and is also deduplicating.
while rsync has some argument flags for compressing and backing up the entire system, most don’t use it that way. in fact, most, imo, use (G)rsync as a high-end file mover. I do.
If you want my opinion for something like a scheduled backup, compressed rescue image and backup, the usual, I’d say Restic, a cli tool, was the best. If it has a UI frontend, then I don’t know about it.
That said let me share with you my current unpopular school of thought: I hate backups, having to worry about backup and I just stopped doing backups. It just doesn’t matter. Don’t give a crap about backups at all anymore. --When it comes to backups I am Peter Gibbons after hypnosis…
Rationale: I use Grsync to back up only what files matter, to an external location, regularly. That’s all I do.
– I realized one day that I am completely unintimidated and not too stressed about having to spend about 2 critical hours setting up a new install in case of a system failure or I wreck distro (more likely).
Get peripherals dialed in, critical packages, firewall, and you are back to commerce and browsing. All the stuff I thought I “loved” and had “dialed in tight” can be made right with spare time. There’s always a thrill with a new distro and trying things different. [you don’t get this freedom in Win and Mac].
Conventional wisdom and I have not always gotten along and I’m better for it.
I had a lot of problems while trying to set Borgmatic, so I abandoned it, unfortunately.
I am thinking in to use restic. Does it also uses Borg as backend?
I’m seriously thinking in restic now. In the reality, I am really “neurotic” regarding backups, unfortunately.
Vorta is also working properly here, but I don’t know. I would prefer a CLI tool.
Do you need some assistance? It should be pretty straightforward.
No restic it a completely different backup solution.
The only warning I would have about restic is that it struggles when the repo size gets very large. However, this probably isn’t a problem unless you are backing up a large quantity of data.
Well, the total data amount I need to backup is something around 160 GB. Maybe restic is fine here?
So, Borgmatic was not running properly. The repo were created, the config file validated, etc.
First it said that the already created repo was not a valid repo. I read in some place that that was OK, and it was asking for the password just after that, so I proceed further.
But it was not mounting the drive, for example. Well, it mounted it, but I was not able to browse it due to a lot of permission errors.
After all of this, I found strange that Borgmatic was not being able to list my repository, always saying there was no repo. 
So I decided to move to another tool.
Sure, we started seeing issues with restic at around 8TB. To be clear, it worked, but everything started taking an unreasonable amount of time.
I understood. Thank you.
So, I really wanted to use Borg/Borgmatic, but I encountered so many problems that I got a little discouraged.
I moved from rsync to borg early last year. It is good: fast and reliable.
But there is one difference to rsync when you want to backup remote machines. With rsync you just need a ssh account and an rsync binary on the remote machine to pull a backup. E.g.
rsync -av remotehost:/source/ localbackupddir/
This does not work that easy with borg. borg can not pull backups. borg can only push from client to a backup server location.
In cases where I need to pull with Borg, I usually mount the remote target and then borg will back it up as if it were local.
One thing that is nice about restic is that it can backup directly to a cloud repository if you need/want that.
I did not want to do that. I am afraid about file permissions, file ownership, extended attributes, xattr, ACLs
I use ssh to execute the borg command on the client:
ssh root@clientpc 'borg create ...'
For this to work I needed to allow the “borg serve” command to be executed for root on the server. I had to append this to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
command="borg serve --restrict-to-path /borg-repos/clientpc",restrict ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3Nzxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx root@clientpc
