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BorgBackup

by The Borg Collective · CLI tool · also known as Borg, borg

Deduplicating backup archiver with compression and authenticated encryption that stores repositories on local disks or remote hosts over SSH

BSD-3-Clause licenseOpen sourceFreeLocalSelf-hostedSelf-hostable
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Link verified Nov 2, 2026

Overview

BorgBackup is an open-source backup program, licensed under a BSD license and maintained by the Borg Collective, that forked from Attic. It splits files into content-defined chunks, stores each unique chunk once across all archives and machines sharing a repository, compresses them with lz4, zstd, zlib or lzma, and encrypts and authenticates them so a remote repository host only ever holds ciphertext. Repositories live on local storage or on any machine reachable over SSH that has borg installed, and archives can be mounted with FUSE to browse old versions.

The stable 1.4 series is what most users run; the 2.0 rewrite is in beta and not recommended for production. Borg is written in Python with C extensions and is installed from distribution packages, single-file binaries or pip on Linux, macOS and BSD. Frontends such as Borgmatic and Vorta add configuration files, scheduling and a GUI, and hosted providers offer Borg-compatible storage.

Its weak spots are the lack of native object-storage backends in the stable series, the requirement that the remote side run borg for efficient SSH repositories, and a repository lock that discourages concurrent access.

Capabilities

  • Content-defined chunking with deduplication across archives and clients
  • Compression with lz4, zstd, zlib or lzma
  • Authenticated encryption so the repository host sees only ciphertext
  • Repositories on local disks or remote hosts over SSH
  • FUSE mounting of archives and selective extraction
  • Pruning by retention policy and integrity checking

Typical workflows

  1. Back up a laptop to a home server over SSH with Borgmatic
  2. Keep deduplicated archives of several hosts in one repository
  3. Mount an old archive to recover a single file

Strengths

  • Mature deduplication and compression
  • Server never needs to be trusted with plaintext
  • Rich frontends (Borgmatic, Vorta)

Limitations

  • No native S3 or cloud backends in the stable series
  • Remote repositories work best when borg is installed on the server
  • Single-writer repository locking

Prerequisites

  • Linux, macOS or BSD client
  • Local disk or SSH-reachable host for the repository

Who it is for

  • Linux and macOS users
  • Administrators backing up servers to an SSH host

Alternatives & comparison

restic shares the encrypted, deduplicated design but targets object storage natively and ships as a Go binary with no remote-side requirement; Borg has had compression longer and is usually paired with SSH hosts. rclone complements both as a transfer tool rather than a snapshotting backup.

  • rclone

    Command-line program to sync, copy, mount and serve files across dozens of cloud storage providers and protocols, with optional client-side encryption

    Open sourceOpen source
  • restic

    Encrypted, deduplicating backup program written in Go that stores snapshots in local, SFTP, S3-compatible and many cloud backends

    Open sourceOpen source
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Sources & verification

Primary sources consulted for this record. Claims are tied to the fields each source supports; the automated link checker re-verifies every URL on a schedule.

Confidence
High
Reviewed
Nov 1, 2026
Links
Verified · Nov 2, 2026

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MinIO, Inc. · Backup & recovery

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