Borg (backup software)

Attic
Original author(s)	Jonas Borgström
Initial release	March 14, 2010; 14 years ago
Final release(s)
	0.16 / May 16, 2015; 8 years ago
Repository	github.com/borgbackup/borg <img alt="Edit this at Wikidata" src="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/10px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png" decoding="async" width="10" height="10" class="mw-file-element" data-file-width="20" data-file-height="20"> ;
Written in	Python, C
Operating system	Linux, FreeBSD, OS X
Size	86 KB
Type	Backup
License	BSD
Website	attic-backup.org [dead link]

Borg
Developer(s)	The Borg Collective
Initial release	June 11, 2015; 8 years ago
Stable release(s)
	1.2.7 / 2 December 2023; 4 months ago
Preview release(s)
	2.0.0b5 / February 27, 2023; 13 months ago
Repository	github.com/borgbackup/borg
Written in	Python, Cython, C
Operating system	Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD; Experimental: Cygwin, Windows via WSL
Type	Backup
License	BSD
Website	borgbackup.org

Borg (previously called Attic) is deduplicating backup software for various Unix-like operating systems.

History edit

Attic development began in 2010 and was accepted to Debian in August 2013. Attic is available from pip and notably part of Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and Slackware.

In 2015, Attic was forked as "Borg" to support a "more open, faster paced development", according to its developers.^[5] Many issues in Attic have been fixed in this fork, but backward compatibility with the original program has been lost (a non-reversible upgrade process exists). Borg 1.0.0 was released on 5 March 2016, Borg 1.1.0 was released on 7 October 2017, Borg 1.2.0 was released on 22 February 2022.

As of 2018, Borg is under active development by many contributors,^[6] while Attic is not being developed. Stable releases are available from various Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE and others, from the ports collection of various BSD derivatives and from brew for macOS. The project provides pre-built binaries for Linux, FreeBSD and macOS.

As of April 2021, the attic website was removed.^[7]

Design edit

Borg offers efficient, deduplicated, compressed and (optionally) encrypted and authenticated backups.

A backup includes metadata like owner/group, permissions, POSIX ACLs and Extended file attributes. It handles special files also - like hardlinks, symlinks, devices files, etc. Internally it represents the files in an archive as a stream of metadata, similar to tar and unlike tools such as git. The Borg project has created extensive documentation of the internal workings.

It uses a rolling hash to implement global data deduplication. Compression defaults to lz4, encryption is AES (via OpenSSL) authenticated by a HMAC.