Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 119 posts

Re: BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

#81

Post by nathants »

Too wrote: post #79
nathants wrote: post #24

Do something simpler. Backups shouldn’t be complex. This should be simpler still: https://github.com/nathants/backup

Index of files stored in git pointing to a remote storage. That sounds exactly like git LFS. Is there any significant difference? In particular in terms of backups.

Definitely similar.

Git LFS is 50k loc, this is 891 loc. There are other differences, but that is the main one.

I don't want a sophisticated backup system. I want one so simple that it disappears into the background.

I want to never fear data loss or my ability to restore with broken tools and a new computer while floating on a raft down a river during a thunder storm. This is what we train for.

Re: BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

#82

Post by hcartiaux »

anyfoo wrote: post #34
puffybuf wrote: post #25

I've been using device mapper+encryption to backup my files to encrypted filesystem on regular files. (cryptsetup on linux, vnconfig+bioctl on openbsd). Is there a reason for me to use borgbackup? Maybe to save space? I even wrote python scripts to automatically cleanup and unmount if something goes wrong (not enough space etc). On openbsd I can even Double encrypt with blowfish(vnconfig -K) and then a diff alg for b…

Does your solution do incremental backups at all? I have backups going back years, because through incremental backups each delta is not very large. Every once in a while things gets sparsed out, so that for example I have daily backups for the recent past, but only monthly and then even yearly for further back.

I maintain my incremental backups and handle the rotation with a shell script (bontmia) based on rsync with `--link-dest` (it creates hard links for unchanged files from the last backup). I've been using this on top of cryptsetup/luks/ext4 or xfs for > 10 years.

Bonus: the backups are readable without any specific tools, you don't have to be able to reinstall a backup software to restore files, which may or may not be difficult in 10 years.

This is the tool I use: https://github.com/hcartiaux/bontmia

It's forked from an old project which is not online anymore, I've fixed a few bugs and cleaned the code over the years.

Re: BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

#83

Post by herewulf »

seymon wrote: post #17

Borg vs Restic vs Kopia ? They are so similar in features. How do they compare? Which to choose?

I don't know about the other two but restic seems to have a very good author/maintainer. That is to say that he is very active in fixing problems, etc..

Re: BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

#84

Post by fl0id »

snickerdoodle12 wrote: post #59
homebrewer wrote: post #9

For anyone looking to migrate off borg because of this, append-only is available in restic, but only with the rest-server backend: https://github.com/restic/restic https://github.com/restic/rest-server which has to be started with --append-only. I use this systemd unit: [Unit] After=network-online.target [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target [Service] ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/rest-server --path /mnt/backups --append-o…

I use restic+rclone+b2 with an api key that can't hard delete files. This gives me dirt-cheap effectively append-only object storage with automatic deletion of soft deleted backups after X days.

Which is exactly what the borg suggest in their issue.

Re: BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

#85

Post by 3036e4 »

I use rsync.net for borg backups. They create daily ZFS snapshots that are read-only to the user, specifically for ransomware protection.

But this was a good reminder I should probably figure out some good way to monitor my borg repo for unintended changes. Having snapshots to roll back to is only useful if a problem is detected in time.

Re: BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

#86

Post by ajb »

nathants wrote: post #24

Do something simpler. Backups shouldn’t be complex. This should be simpler still: https://github.com/nathants/backup

Cool, but looks like it's going to miss capabilities, so not suitable for a full OS backup (see https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/113293)

Re: BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

#87

Post by nathants »

ajb wrote: post #86
nathants wrote: post #24

Do something simpler. Backups shouldn’t be complex. This should be simpler still: https://github.com/nathants/backup

Cool, but looks like it's going to miss capabilities, so not suitable for a full OS backup (see https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/113293 )

Interesting. I'm not trying to restore bootable systems, just data. Still, probably worthwhile to rebuild in Go soon.

Re: BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

#88

Post by mike-cardwell »

homebrewer wrote: post #9

For anyone looking to migrate off borg because of this, append-only is available in restic, but only with the rest-server backend: https://github.com/restic/restic https://github.com/restic/rest-server which has to be started with --append-only. I use this systemd unit: [Unit] After=network-online.target [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target [Service] ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/rest-server --path /mnt/backups --append-o…

You say "only with the restic backend" but you can do it with a simple Nginx backend too https://www.grepular.com/Nginx_Restic_Backend - The restic server part is redundant

Re: BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

#89

Post by globular-toast »

aeadio wrote: post #39
globular-toast wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any good options for an off-site zfs backup server besides a colo? Would be interested to know what others have set up as I'm not really happy with how I do it. I have zfs on my NAS running locally. I backup to that from my PC via rsync triggered by anacron daily. From my NAS I use rclone to send encrypted backups to Backblaze. I'd be happier with something more frequent from PC to NAS. Syncthing maybe? The…

Aside from rsync.net which was mentioned in a sibling comment, there’s also https://zfs.rent , or any VPS with Linux or FreeBSD installed.

zfs.rent is in the wrong location and I can't see anything about zfs send/receive support on rsync.net. What kind of VPS product has multiple redundant disks attached? Aren't they usually provided with virtual storage?

Re: BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

#90

Post by formerly_proven »

antoniomika wrote: post #53

This has been replaced with a permissions feature that still provides both delete and overwrite protections. The difference is the underlying store needs to implement it rather than running a server that understands the permission differences. You can read more about this change here: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/8823#issuecomment-...

The old append-only mode was a hack that wasn’t very useful in practice anyway, because there were no tools to dissect changes in a repository and the datastructures wouldn’t support that anyway.

Making e.g. snapshots on the backing storage was always the better approach.

Post reply on HN