Installation

There are different ways to install Borg:

  • Distribution Package - easy and fast if a package is available from your distribution.
  • Standalone Binary - easy and fast, we provide a ready-to-use binary file that comes bundled with all dependencies.
  • From Source, either:
    • Using pip - installing a source package with pip needs more installation steps and requires all dependencies with development headers and a compiler.
    • Using git - for developers and power users who want to have the latest code or use revision control (each release is tagged).

Distribution Package

Some distributions might offer a ready-to-use borgbackup package which can be installed with the package manager.

Important

Those packages may not be up to date with the latest Borg releases. Before submitting a bug report, check the package version and compare that to our latest release then review Important notes to see if the bug has been fixed. Report bugs to the package maintainer rather than directly to Borg if the package is out of date in the distribution.

Please ask package maintainers to build a package or, if you can package / submit it yourself, please help us with that! See #105 on github to followup on packaging efforts.

Standalone Binary

Note

Releases are signed with an OpenPGP key, see Security for more instructions.

Borg x86/x64 amd/intel compatible binaries (generated with pyinstaller) are available on the releases page for the following platforms:

  • Linux: glibc >= 2.19 (ok for most supported Linux releases). Older glibc releases are untested and may not work.
  • Mac OS X: 10.12 (unknown whether it works for older releases)
  • FreeBSD: 10.3 (unknown whether it works for older releases)

ARM binaries are built by Johann Bauer, see: https://borg.bauerj.eu/

To install such a binary, just drop it into a directory in your PATH, make borg readable and executable for its users and then you can run borg:

sudo cp borg-linux64 /usr/local/bin/borg
sudo chown root:root /usr/local/bin/borg
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/borg

Optionally you can create a symlink to have borgfs available, which is an alias for borg mount:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/borg /usr/local/bin/borgfs

Note that the binary uses /tmp to unpack Borg with all dependencies. It will fail if /tmp has not enough free space or is mounted with the noexec option. You can change the temporary directory by setting the TEMP environment variable before running Borg.

If a new version is released, you will have to manually download it and replace the old version using the same steps as shown above.

From Source

Note

Some older Linux systems (like RHEL/CentOS 5) and Python interpreter binaries compiled to be able to run on such systems (like Python installed via Anaconda) might miss functions required by Borg.

This issue will be detected early and Borg will abort with a fatal error.

Dependencies

To install Borg from a source package (including pip), you have to install the following dependencies first:

  • Python 3 >= 3.5.0, plus development headers. Even though Python 3 is not the default Python version on most systems, it is usually available as an optional install.
  • OpenSSL >= 1.0.0, plus development headers.
  • libacl (which depends on libattr), both plus development headers.
  • We have bundled code of the following packages, but borg by default (see setup.py if you want to change that) prefers a shared library if it can be found on the system (lib + dev headers) at build time:
  • some Python dependencies, pip will automatically install them for you
  • optionally, the llfuse Python package is required if you wish to mount an archive as a FUSE filesystem. See setup.py about the version requirements.

If you have troubles finding the right package names, have a look at the distribution specific sections below or the Vagrantfile in the git repository, which contains installation scripts for a number of operating systems.

In the following, the steps needed to install the dependencies are listed for a selection of platforms. If your distribution is not covered by these instructions, try to use your package manager to install the dependencies. On FreeBSD, you may need to get a recent enough OpenSSL version from FreeBSD ports.

After you have installed the dependencies, you can proceed with steps outlined under Using pip.

Debian / Ubuntu

Install the dependencies with development headers:

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev python3-pip python-virtualenv \
libssl-dev openssl \
libacl1-dev libacl1 \
build-essential
sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev fuse pkg-config    # optional, for FUSE support

In case you get complaints about permission denied on /etc/fuse.conf: on Ubuntu this means your user is not in the fuse group. Add yourself to that group, log out and log in again.

Fedora / Korora

Install the dependencies with development headers:

sudo dnf install python3 python3-devel python3-pip python3-virtualenv
sudo dnf install openssl-devel openssl
sudo dnf install libacl-devel libacl
sudo dnf install gcc gcc-c++
sudo dnf install redhat-rpm-config                 # not needed in Korora
sudo dnf install fuse-devel fuse pkgconfig         # optional, for FUSE support

openSUSE Tumbleweed / Leap

Install the dependencies automatically using zypper:

sudo zypper source-install --build-deps-only borgbackup

Alternatively, you can enumerate all build dependencies in the command line:

sudo zypper install python3 python3-devel \
libacl-devel openssl-devel \
python3-Cython python3-Sphinx python3-msgpack-python \
python3-pytest python3-setuptools python3-setuptools_scm \
python3-sphinx_rtd_theme python3-llfuse gcc gcc-c++

Mac OS X

When installing via Homebrew_, dependencies are installed automatically. To install dependencies manually:

brew install python3 openssl
brew install pkg-config                            # optional, for FUSE support
pip3 install virtualenv

For FUSE support to mount the backup archives, you need at least version 3.0 of FUSE for OS X, which is available via Github, or Homebrew:

brew cask install osxfuse

For OS X Catalina and later, be aware that you must authorize full disk access. It is no longer sufficient to run borg backups as root. If you have not yet granted full disk access, and you run Borg backup from cron, you will see messages such as:

/Users/you/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary: scandir: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted:

To fix this problem, you should grant full disk acccess to cron, and to your Terminal application. More information can be found here.

FreeBSD

Listed below are packages you will need to install Borg, its dependencies, and commands to make FUSE work for using the mount command.

pkg install -y python3 openssl fusefs-libs pkgconf
pkg install -y git
python3 -m ensurepip  # to install pip for Python3
To use the mount command:
echo 'fuse_load="YES"' >> /boot/loader.conf
echo 'vfs.usermount=1' >> /etc/sysctl.conf
kldload fuse
sysctl vfs.usermount=1

Windows 10’s Linux Subsystem

Note

Running under Windows 10’s Linux Subsystem is experimental and has not been tested much yet.

Just follow the Ubuntu Linux installation steps. You can omit the FUSE stuff, it won’t work anyway.

Cygwin

Note

Running under Cygwin is experimental and has not been tested much yet.

Use the Cygwin installer to install the dependencies:

python3 python3-devel python3-setuptools
binutils gcc-g++
libopenssl openssl-devel
git make openssh

You can then install pip and virtualenv:

easy_install-3.7 pip
pip install virtualenv

Using pip

Virtualenv can be used to build and install Borg without affecting the system Python or requiring root access. Using a virtual environment is optional, but recommended except for the most simple use cases.

Note

If you install into a virtual environment, you need to activate it first (source borg-env/bin/activate), before running borg. Alternatively, symlink borg-env/bin/borg into some directory that is in your PATH so you can just run borg.

This will use pip to install the latest release from PyPi:

virtualenv --python=python3 borg-env
source borg-env/bin/activate

# might be required if your tools are outdated
pip install -U pip setuptools wheel
# install Borg + Python dependencies into virtualenv
pip install borgbackup
# or alternatively (if you want FUSE support):
pip install borgbackup[fuse]

To upgrade Borg to a new version later, run the following after activating your virtual environment:

pip install -U borgbackup  # or ... borgbackup[fuse]

Using git

This uses latest, unreleased development code from git. While we try not to break master, there are no guarantees on anything.

# get borg from github
git clone https://github.com/borgbackup/borg.git

virtualenv --python=python3 borg-env
source borg-env/bin/activate   # always before using!

# install borg + dependencies into virtualenv
cd borg
pip install -r requirements.d/development.txt
pip install -r requirements.d/docs.txt  # optional, to build the docs
pip install -r requirements.d/fuse.txt  # optional, for FUSE support
pip install -e .  # in-place editable mode

# optional: run all the tests, on all supported Python versions
# requires fakeroot, available through your package manager
fakeroot -u tox

Note

As a developer or power user, you always want to use a virtual environment.