BorgBackup – Deduplicating archiver with compression and authenticated encryption

Thanks for your recommendation. I'm giving Pika a whirl and I'm liking it so far. I have been using Timeshift for years but it's has some issues that I'm hoping borg/pika will address.

tl;dr Duplicity does full or incremental backups, BorgBackup only does full backups but with deduplication.

After the first backup with Duplicity, you can choose to do an incremental backup which will only store the data that has changed since the last backup. This saves time and disk space but you have to do slow full backups regularly. See question 3 of the FAQ.

BorgBackup alway does a full backup. But it divides all data into chunks or blocks (don’t know what they call it exactly at the moment). It then hashes those chunks and stores them in a content-addressed storage layer. So it basically works like Git under the hood (plus encryption). If a chunk doesn’t change between backups it‘s already there and does not have to be stored again. A backup is always a full index of the data.

With today‘s fast processors and hashing algorithms, a backup with Borg should be just as fast as an incremental backup with Duplicity. If you ask me deduplicated backups are just plain superior.

Another tool that works like BorgBackup is Restic, which I prefer. Both are good choices that I would trust with my data.

Someone on github has a decent comparison of a bunch of different backup solutions. Afaik Kopia generally uses more memory but is the faster, and restic is pretty fast and doesn't use as much RAM as kopia (for awhile people recommended against restic as it lacked compression, but they added it in 0.14 last year).

https://github.com/deajan/backup-bench#in-depth-comparison-of-backup-solutions

I personally prefer kopia (has a gui to help configure it), but restic is also good. I'm not a fan of Borg because you can't backup directly to object storage (eg. Backblaze B2/Amazon S3/Wasabi/etc), you have to backup to a local or mounted drive, then upload the backup.

I'm also waiting on https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic to get better windows support, as it should use less memory than restic while being as fast, or maybe even faster.

I had good experience with BorgBackup and restic. However, I've settled with restic since it had the right back ends for me that Borg did not have and I rather like it's just one static binary instead of Python+C.

As far as I can see, BorgBackup has a bus factor of one while restic has two to three active contributers.

Other than that, they are quite comparable, I think.