Borg 2.0.0b3
Miscellaneous Help¶
borg help patterns¶
When specifying one or more file paths in a Borg command that supports patterns for the respective option or argument, you can apply the patterns described here to include only desired files and/or exclude unwanted ones. Patterns can be used
- for
--excludeoption, - in the file given with
--exclude-fromoption, - for
--patternoption, - in the file given with
--patterns-fromoption and - for
PATHarguments that explicitly support them.
Borg always stores all file paths normalized and relative to the
current recursion root. The recursion root is also named PATH in
Borg commands like borg create that do a file discovery, so do not
confuse the root with the PATH argument of e.g. borg extract.
Starting with Borg 1.2, paths that are matched against patterns always
appear relative. If you give /absolute/ as root, the paths going
into the matcher will look relative like absolute/.../file.ext.
If you give ../some/path as root, the paths will look like
some/path/.../file.ext.
File patterns support five different styles. If followed by a colon ‘:’,
the first two characters of a pattern are used as a style selector.
Explicit style selection is necessary if a non-default style is desired
or when the desired pattern starts with two alphanumeric characters
followed by a colon (i.e. aa:something/*).
- Fnmatch, selector
fm: - This is the default style for
--excludeand--exclude-from. These patterns use a variant of shell pattern syntax, with ‘*’ matching any number of characters, ‘?’ matching any single character, ‘[…]’ matching any single character specified, including ranges, and ‘[!…]’ matching any character not specified. For the purpose of these patterns, the path separator (backslash for Windows and ‘/’ on other systems) is not treated specially. Wrap meta-characters in brackets for a literal match (i.e.[?]to match the literal character ‘?’). For a path to match a pattern, the full path must match, or it must match from the start of the full path to just before a path separator. Except for the root path, paths will never end in the path separator when matching is attempted. Thus, if a given pattern ends in a path separator, a ‘*’ is appended before matching is attempted. A leading path separator is always removed. - Shell-style patterns, selector
sh: - This is the default style for
--patternand--patterns-from. Like fnmatch patterns these are similar to shell patterns. The difference is that the pattern may include**/for matching zero or more directory levels,*for matching zero or more arbitrary characters with the exception of any path separator. A leading path separator is always removed. - Regular expressions, selector
re: - Unlike shell patterns, regular expressions are not required to match the full path and any substring match is sufficient. It is strongly recommended to anchor patterns to the start (‘^’), to the end (‘$’) or both. Path separators (backslash for Windows and ‘/’ on other systems) in paths are always normalized to a forward slash ‘/’ before applying a pattern.
- Path prefix, selector
pp: - This pattern style is useful to match whole sub-directories. The pattern
pp:root/somedirmatchesroot/somedirand everything therein. A leading path separator is always removed. - Path full-match, selector
pf: This pattern style is (only) useful to match full paths. This is kind of a pseudo pattern as it can not have any variable or unspecified parts - the full path must be given.
pf:root/file.extmatchesroot/file.extonly. A leading path separator is always removed.Implementation note: this is implemented via very time-efficient O(1) hashtable lookups (this means you can have huge amounts of such patterns without impacting performance much). Due to that, this kind of pattern does not respect any context or order. If you use such a pattern to include a file, it will always be included (if the directory recursion encounters it). Other include/exclude patterns that would normally match will be ignored. Same logic applies for exclude.
Note
re:, sh: and fm: patterns are all implemented on top of
the Python SRE engine. It is very easy to formulate patterns for each
of these types which requires an inordinate amount of time to match
paths. If untrusted users are able to supply patterns, ensure they
cannot supply re: patterns. Further, ensure that sh: and
fm: patterns only contain a handful of wildcards at most.
Exclusions can be passed via the command line option --exclude. When used
from within a shell, the patterns should be quoted to protect them from
expansion.
The --exclude-from option permits loading exclusion patterns from a text
file with one pattern per line. Lines empty or starting with the hash sign
‘#’ after removing whitespace on both ends are ignored. The optional style
selector prefix is also supported for patterns loaded from a file. Due to
whitespace removal, paths with whitespace at the beginning or end can only be
excluded using regular expressions.
To test your exclusion patterns without performing an actual backup you can
run borg create --list --dry-run ....
Examples:
# Exclude '/home/user/file.o' but not '/home/user/file.odt':
$ borg create -e '*.o' archive /
# Exclude '/home/user/junk' and '/home/user/subdir/junk' but
# not '/home/user/importantjunk' or '/etc/junk':
$ borg create -e 'home/*/junk' archive /
# Exclude the contents of '/home/user/cache' but not the directory itself:
$ borg create -e home/user/cache/ archive /
# The file '/home/user/cache/important' is *not* backed up:
$ borg create -e home/user/cache/ archive / /home/user/cache/important
# The contents of directories in '/home' are not backed up when their name
# ends in '.tmp'
$ borg create --exclude 're:^home/[^/]+\.tmp/' archive /
# Load exclusions from file
$ cat >exclude.txt <<EOF
# Comment line
home/*/junk
*.tmp
fm:aa:something/*
re:^home/[^/]+\.tmp/
sh:home/*/.thumbnails
# Example with spaces, no need to escape as it is processed by borg
some file with spaces.txt
EOF
$ borg create --exclude-from exclude.txt archive /
A more general and easier to use way to define filename matching patterns
exists with the --pattern and --patterns-from options. Using
these, you may specify the backup roots, default pattern styles and
patterns for inclusion and exclusion.
- Root path prefix
R - A recursion root path starts with the prefix
R, followed by a path (a plain path, not a file pattern). Use this prefix to have the root paths in the patterns file rather than as command line arguments. - Pattern style prefix
P - To change the default pattern style, use the
Pprefix, followed by the pattern style abbreviation (fm,pf,pp,re,sh). All patterns following this line will use this style until another style is specified. - Exclude pattern prefix
- - Use the prefix
-, followed by a pattern, to define an exclusion. This has the same effect as the--excludeoption. - Exclude no-recurse pattern prefix
! - Use the prefix
!, followed by a pattern, to define an exclusion that does not recurse into subdirectories. This saves time, but prevents include patterns to match any files in subdirectories. - Include pattern prefix
+ - Use the prefix
+, followed by a pattern, to define inclusions. This is useful to include paths that are covered in an exclude pattern and would otherwise not be backed up.
The first matching pattern is used, so if an include pattern matches before an exclude pattern, the file is backed up. Note that a no-recurse exclude stops examination of subdirectories so that potential includes will not match - use normal excludes for such use cases.
Tip: You can easily test your patterns with --dry-run and --list:
$ borg create --dry-run --list --patterns-from patterns.txt archive
This will list the considered files one per line, prefixed with a character that indicates the action (e.g. ‘x’ for excluding, see Item flags in borg create usage docs).
Note
It’s possible that a sub-directory/file is matched while parent directories are not. In that case, parent directories are not backed up and thus their user, group, permission, etc. cannot be restored.
Patterns (--pattern) and excludes (--exclude) from the command line are
considered first (in the order of appearance). Then patterns from --patterns-from
are added. Exclusion patterns from --exclude-from files are appended last.
Examples:
# backup pics, but not the ones from 2018, except the good ones:
# note: using = is essential to avoid cmdline argument parsing issues.
borg create --pattern=+pics/2018/good --pattern=-pics/2018 archive pics
# backup only JPG/JPEG files (case insensitive) in all home directories:
borg create --pattern '+ re:\.jpe?g(?i)$' archive /home
# backup homes, but exclude big downloads (like .ISO files) or hidden files:
borg create --exclude 're:\.iso(?i)$' --exclude 'sh:home/**/.*' archive /home
# use a file with patterns (recursion root '/' via command line):
borg create --patterns-from patterns.lst archive /
The patterns.lst file could look like that:
# "sh:" pattern style is the default
# exclude caches
- home/*/.cache
# include susans home
+ home/susan
# also back up this exact file
+ pf:home/bobby/specialfile.txt
# don't backup the other home directories
- home/*
# don't even look in /dev, /proc, /run, /sys, /tmp (note: would exclude files like /device, too)
! re:^(dev|proc|run|sys|tmp)
You can specify recursion roots either on the command line or in a patternfile:
# these two commands do the same thing
borg create --exclude home/bobby/junk archive /home/bobby /home/susan
borg create --patterns-from patternfile.lst archive
patternfile.lst:
# note that excludes use fm: by default and patternfiles use sh: by default.
# therefore, we need to specify fm: to have the same exact behavior.
P fm
R /home/bobby
R /home/susan
- home/bobby/junk
This allows you to share the same patterns between multiple repositories without needing to specify them on the command line.
borg help match-archives¶
The --match-archives option matches a given pattern against the list of all archive
names in the repository.
It uses pattern styles similar to the ones described by borg help patterns:
- Identical match pattern, selector
id:(default) - Simple string match, must fully match exactly as given.
- Shell-style patterns, selector
sh: - Match like on the shell, wildcards like * and ? work.
- Regular expressions, selector
re: - Full regular expression support. This is very powerful, but can also get rather complicated.
Examples:
# id: style
borg delete --match-archives 'id:archive-with-crap'
borg delete -a 'id:archive-with-crap' # same, using short option
borg delete -a 'archive-with-crap' # same, because 'id:' is the default
# sh: style
borg delete -a 'sh:home-kenny-*'
# re: style
borg delete -a 're:pc[123]-home-(user1|user2)-2022-09-.*'
borg help placeholders¶
Repository URLs, --name, -a / --match-archives, --comment
and --remote-path values support these placeholders:
- {hostname}
- The (short) hostname of the machine.
- {fqdn}
- The full name of the machine.
- {reverse-fqdn}
- The full name of the machine in reverse domain name notation.
- {now}
- The current local date and time, by default in ISO-8601 format. You can also supply your own format string, e.g. {now:%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S}
- {utcnow}
- The current UTC date and time, by default in ISO-8601 format. You can also supply your own format string, e.g. {utcnow:%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S}
- {user}
- The user name (or UID, if no name is available) of the user running borg.
- {pid}
- The current process ID.
- {borgversion}
- The version of borg, e.g.: 1.0.8rc1
- {borgmajor}
- The version of borg, only the major version, e.g.: 1
- {borgminor}
- The version of borg, only major and minor version, e.g.: 1.0
- {borgpatch}
- The version of borg, only major, minor and patch version, e.g.: 1.0.8
If literal curly braces need to be used, double them for escaping:
borg create /path/to/repo::{{literal_text}}
Examples:
borg create /path/to/repo::{hostname}-{user}-{utcnow} ...
borg create /path/to/repo::{hostname}-{now:%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S%z} ...
borg prune -a 'sh:{hostname}-*' ...
Note
systemd uses a difficult, non-standard syntax for command lines in unit files (refer to the systemd.unit(5) manual page).
When invoking borg from unit files, pay particular attention to escaping,
especially when using the now/utcnow placeholders, since systemd performs its own
%-based variable replacement even in quoted text. To avoid interference from systemd,
double all percent signs ({hostname}-{now:%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S}
becomes {hostname}-{now:%%Y-%%m-%%d_%%H:%%M:%%S}).
borg help compression¶
It is no problem to mix different compression methods in one repo, deduplication is done on the source data chunks (not on the compressed or encrypted data).
If some specific chunk was once compressed and stored into the repo, creating another backup that also uses this chunk will not change the stored chunk. So if you use different compression specs for the backups, whichever stores a chunk first determines its compression. See also borg recreate.
Compression is lz4 by default. If you want something else, you have to specify what you want.
Valid compression specifiers are:
- none
- Do not compress.
- lz4
- Use lz4 compression. Very high speed, very low compression. (default)
- zstd[,L]
- Use zstd (“zstandard”) compression, a modern wide-range algorithm. If you do not explicitly give the compression level L (ranging from 1 to 22), it will use level 3. Archives compressed with zstd are not compatible with borg < 1.1.4.
- zlib[,L]
- Use zlib (“gz”) compression. Medium speed, medium compression. If you do not explicitly give the compression level L (ranging from 0 to 9), it will use level 6. Giving level 0 (means “no compression”, but still has zlib protocol overhead) is usually pointless, you better use “none” compression.
- lzma[,L]
- Use lzma (“xz”) compression. Low speed, high compression. If you do not explicitly give the compression level L (ranging from 0 to 9), it will use level 6. Giving levels above 6 is pointless and counterproductive because it does not compress better due to the buffer size used by borg - but it wastes lots of CPU cycles and RAM.
- auto,C[,L]
- Use a built-in heuristic to decide per chunk whether to compress or not. The heuristic tries with lz4 whether the data is compressible. For incompressible data, it will not use compression (uses “none”). For compressible data, it uses the given C[,L] compression - with C[,L] being any valid compression specifier.
- obfuscate,SPEC,C[,L]
Use compressed-size obfuscation to make fingerprinting attacks based on the observable stored chunk size more difficult. Note: - you must combine this with encryption or it won’t make any sense. - your repo size will be bigger, of course.
The SPEC value will determine how the size obfuscation will work:
Relative random reciprocal size variation: Size will increase by a factor, relative to the compressed data size. Smaller factors are often used, larger factors rarely. 1: factor 0.01 .. 100.0 2: factor 0.1 .. 1000.0 3: factor 1.0 .. 10000.0 4: factor 10.0 .. 100000.0 5: factor 100.0 .. 1000000.0 6: factor 1000.0 .. 10000000.0
Add a randomly sized padding up to the given size: 110: 1kiB … 120: 1MiB … 123: 8MiB (max.)
Examples:
borg create --compression lz4 REPO::ARCHIVE data
borg create --compression zstd REPO::ARCHIVE data
borg create --compression zstd,10 REPO::ARCHIVE data
borg create --compression zlib REPO::ARCHIVE data
borg create --compression zlib,1 REPO::ARCHIVE data
borg create --compression auto,lzma,6 REPO::ARCHIVE data
borg create --compression auto,lzma ...
borg create --compression obfuscate,3,none ...
borg create --compression obfuscate,3,auto,zstd,10 ...
borg create --compression obfuscate,2,zstd,6 ...