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Backup

Borg Backup

Local Repository

I use Borg Backup to backup my Laptop, PC and Pi. I backup my Laptop and PC to a remotely hosted Nextcloud instance and an external hard drive, and my Pi to a USB drive. I initialized the backups using borg init --encryption repokey /path/to/repo and then execute the backups via script: 

#!/bin/sh
REPO="xxx"
SOURCE="xxx"
export BORG_PASSPHRASE="xxx"

borg create --verbose $REPO::$(date +%Y-%m-%d) $SOURCE -e /home/lily/Nextcloud/
borg prune --verbose --list $REPO --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6

Remote Repository

On my OMV NAS, I use Borg Backup to backup to a remote repository. There's a Borg Backup Plugin you can use to configure it in the Web GUI, but I simply couldn't get it to work. You can check if the Borg connection works by executing the following command on the Borg server: borg info 'ssh://server@user:<sshport>/./test. This always worked, but OMV gave me an error message about the connection not being able to be established. The plugin basically just executes the commands to initialize a remote Borg repo, so I simply did this on the command line.

Prerequisites

  • Borg installed on both backup server and client
  • SSH connection with SSH keys established from client to server

Note

Borg does not work with a SSH password, SSH keys must be used. Borg needs to know what keys to use, so set an environment variable for it: export BORG_SSH='ssh -i /path/to/SSH_KEY I would strongly recommend using a custom SSH command by changing SSH port for the server in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. A good instruction for creating SSH keys can be found here.

Configuring the Repo

  • Use the borg info command mentioned above to make sure the client can reach the backup server.
  • Initialize the repo: borg init --encryption repokey user@host:/path/to/repo

Note

Make sure to copy not only the passphrase but also the repokey!

  • Create a backup: borg create user@host:/path/to/repo
  • You can then use the same backup script as shown above and then create a cronjob for it with crontab -e so it automatically runs at regular intervalls.

Timeshift Snapshots

I use Timeshift for system snapshots. Simply install the 'timeshift' package and use man timeshift to see all available options. I use rsync mode since my filesystem is ext4 - there's a btrfs mode if that's the filesystem you use - but only on systems having an Ubuntu-type subvolume layout (with @ and @home subvolumes).