Howto Back Up With Borg On USB Drive

Also see How to back up with borg to remote location

So I got tired of Time Machine - it has nice UI, but it’s fucking slow and I’ve seen some weird shit and I don’t trust it anymore. Even though borg is CLI only, but works pretty well. Since I bought Crucial MX500 M.2 and put it into an existing external USB box, I ditched Time Machine and moved to borg. While drive is not encrypted, the backup is.

Why?

• encryption
• compression
• deduplication

Setup:

brew install borgbackup
borg init --encryption=repokey-blake2 .
borg config . additional_free_space 2G
borg config . append_only 1

Additional free space is there because borg cannot prune old backups when no space left. I have append only option turned on for now since I used it in remote backup and sort of makes sense. I will keep an eye on it when the free space gets low.

borg create --compression zstd --progress --one-file-system --info --exclude ~/Library/Containers /Volumes/christina/backups/::{hostname}-{now:%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f} ~