This article will cover the basics of setting up a borg repository, creating backups, and how to run them automatically.
Initialize the repository
You should have a separate borg repository for each system you want to back up. Borg docs say that it’s possible to share a repository with multiple hosts, but not recommended.
My laptop has a secondary drive that I am dedicating for backups, and I have mounted it at /backup. I’m going to create a repository called borg-hostname. My laptop’s hostname is the letter p.
sudo borg init --encryption=none /backup/borg-pCreate an archive
Whenever I want to back up my files, I create a new archive inside my borg-p repository. Deduplication makes incremental backups unnecessary. Just take a full backup every time, and borg figures out which files have been changed, only storing one copy of each file. Before deduplication, incremental backups were complicated for me to set up.
Since this command takes up so many lines, I made a script file to contain it:
#!/usr/bin/env sh
ROOT_DIR="/"
borg create --stats --progress \
--exclude "/boot/efi/*" \
--exclude "/backup/*" \
--exclude "/dev/*" \
--exclude "/mnt/*" \
--exclude "/proc/*" \
--exclude "/run/*" \
--exclude "/tmp/*" \
--exclude "/sys/*" \
--exclude "/var/cache/pacman/pkg/*" \
--exclude "/var/run/*" \
--exclude "/var/lock/*" \
/backup/borg-p::{hostname}-{now:%Y-%m-%d} $ROOT_DIRBorg fills in {hostname} and {now:%Y-%m-%d} with the hostname and date. You don’t have to change them manually.
Optional: test your backup
Now try and restore the backup you just created. Create a new partition somewhere that you can boot from. If you need to resize your partitions to make room, you can boot SystemRescue from USB to do that.
My new empty partition is mounted at /mnt/test.
borg-p is the name of my repository and p-2024-04-29 is the archive I created in the previous step. You have to cd into the target directory first.
cd /mnt/test
sudo borg extract /backup/borg-p::p-2024-04-29Now edit /mnt/test/etc/fstab and update the UUID of the root filesystem to the new partition.
This part varies a little bit depending on your boot loader configuration, but you’ll want to copy your existing boot loader entry for Arch into a new entry, and change the UUID of root partition just like you did for fstab.
Reboot. If you’re able to boot into the restored partition, great! Proceed to the next step for automation instructions.
Automate backups with borgmatic
I’m actually not going to be using the borg script I wrote in the first section. That was just a test to make sure borg works. Instead of calling borg directly, I’m going to use borgmatic which will in turn call borg.
To generate the default borgmatic config files, run:
sudo borgmatic config generateThat generates a rather long config however, and most of the sections aren’t needed.
My config.yaml is very simple, this is what it looks like:
repositories:
- path: /backup/borg-p
label: local
patterns:
- R /
- '- /boot/efi/*'
- '- /backup/*'
- '- /dev/*'
- '- /mnt/*'
- '- /proc/*'
- '- /run/*'
- '- /tmp/*'
- '- /sys/*'
- '- /var/cache/pacman/pkg/*'
- '- /var/run/*'
- '- /var/lock/*'The first pattern is a recursive on the root directory. The rest of them are directories to exclude.
You can run borgmatic manually to create an archive based on the above configuration:
sudo borgmatic createor set up a systemd timer to run at intervals:
sudo systemctl enable borgmatic.timerOffsite backups
In this article, I backed up my files to another hard drive inside of my laptop. Ideally, I should be backing up to a drive that is not connected to my computer. Preferably over the network, because I don’t want to plug in a USB drive manually every time. BorgBase has plans starting at $2/month, and that’s what I’m planning on setting up soon.
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