borg export-tar

borg [common options] export-tar [options] ARCHIVE FILE [PATH...]
positional arguments
  ARCHIVE archive to export
  FILE output tar file. “-” to write to stdout instead.
  PATH paths to extract; patterns are supported
optional arguments
  --tar-filter filter program to pipe data through
  --list output verbose list of items (files, dirs, …)

Common options

Exclusion options
  -e PATTERN, --exclude PATTERN exclude paths matching PATTERN
  --exclude-from EXCLUDEFILE read exclude patterns from EXCLUDEFILE, one per line
  --pattern PATTERN experimental: include/exclude paths matching PATTERN
  --patterns-from PATTERNFILE experimental: read include/exclude patterns from PATTERNFILE, one per line
  --strip-components NUMBER Remove the specified number of leading path elements. Paths with fewer elements will be silently skipped.

Description

This command creates a tarball from an archive.

When giving ‘-‘ as the output FILE, Borg will write a tar stream to standard output.

By default (--tar-filter=auto) Borg will detect whether the FILE should be compressed based on its file extension and pipe the tarball through an appropriate filter before writing it to FILE:

  • .tar.gz: gzip
  • .tar.bz2: bzip2
  • .tar.xz: xz

Alternatively a --tar-filter program may be explicitly specified. It should read the uncompressed tar stream from stdin and write a compressed/filtered tar stream to stdout.

The generated tarball uses the GNU tar format.

export-tar is a lossy conversion: BSD flags, ACLs, extended attributes (xattrs), atime and ctime are not exported. Timestamp resolution is limited to whole seconds, not the nanosecond resolution otherwise supported by Borg.

A --sparse option (as found in borg extract) is not supported.

By default the entire archive is extracted but a subset of files and directories can be selected by passing a list of PATHs as arguments. The file selection can further be restricted by using the --exclude option.

See the output of the “borg help patterns” command for more help on exclude patterns.

--progress can be slower than no progress display, since it makes one additional pass over the archive metadata.

Examples

# export as uncompressed tar
$ borg export-tar /path/to/repo::Monday Monday.tar

# exclude some types, compress using gzip
$ borg export-tar /path/to/repo::Monday Monday.tar.gz --exclude '*.so'

# use higher compression level with gzip
$ borg export-tar --tar-filter="gzip -9" testrepo::linux Monday.tar.gz

# export a tar, but instead of storing it on disk,
# upload it to a remote site using curl.
$ borg export-tar /path/to/repo::Monday - | curl --data-binary @- https://somewhere/to/POST

# remote extraction via "tarpipe"
$ borg export-tar /path/to/repo::Monday - | ssh somewhere "cd extracted; tar x"