How To Create Efficient Backups

Backups aren’t just a safety net for Trekkies such as Shashank Sharma, but a way of life. But they can take up quite a lot of space if not done right…

- Shashank Sharma

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The main website of the project is https:// borgbackup.org. You can access the official documentation at https:// borgbackup. readthedocs. io. The main website also provides links to free resources as well as commercial support and services around Borg.

Most backup strategies lead to a lot of wasted space because you invariably end up making copies of the same data over and over again. In essence, data deduplication is the process of comparing chunks of data, and retaining only a single unique copy, thereby saving disk space. When deployed as a data backup strategy, this means that only changes since the last backup are stored.

Backup tools for Linux are as prolific as browsers, video players or even text editors, BorgBackup, or just Borg, is a deduplicating backup utility. Released under the BSD license, the project was forked from Attic, a popular backup utility, in 2015. Thanks to the data deduplication technique, Borg is suitable as an everyday home or even enterprise backup solution, with a host of features that make it a breeze to use.

Since Borg is only interested in changes since your last backup, the entire process is fast and efficient. Even better, Borg also supports compression, which further limits the amount of disk space eaten by backups. Finally, Borg also supports client-side encryption, so you can safely encrypt backups before they are transmitted to remote storage locations. Apart from all that,