borg/docs/faq.rst

.. _faq:
.. include:: global.rst.inc

Frequently asked questions
==========================

Which platforms are supported?
    Currently Linux, FreeBSD and MacOS X are supported.

    You can try your luck on other POSIX-like systems, like Cygwin,
    other BSDs, etc. but they are not officially supported.

Can I backup VM disk images?
    Yes, the :ref:`deduplication <deduplication_def>` technique used by |project_name|
    makes sure only the modified parts of the file are stored.
    Also, we have optional simple sparse file support for extract.

Can I backup from multiple servers into a single repository?
    Yes, but in order for the deduplication used by Borg to work, it
    needs to keep a local cache containing checksums of all file
    chunks already stored in the repository. This cache is stored in
    ``~/.cache/borg/``.  If Borg detects that a repository has been
    modified since the local cache was updated it will need to rebuild
    the cache. This rebuild can be quite time consuming.

    So, yes it's possible. But it will be most efficient if a single
    repository is only modified from one place. Also keep in mind that
    Borg will keep an exclusive lock on the repository while creating
    or deleting archives, which may make *simultaneous* backups fail.

Which file types, attributes, etc. are preserved?
    * Directories
    * Regular files
    * Hardlinks (considering all files in the same archive)
    * Symlinks (stored as symlink, the symlink is not followed)
    * Character and block device files
    * FIFOs ("named pipes")
    * Name
    * Contents
    * Time of last modification (nanosecond precision with Python >= 3.3)
    * User ID of owner
    * Group ID of owner
    * Unix Mode/Permissions (u/g/o permissions, suid, sgid, sticky)
    * Extended Attributes (xattrs)
    * Access Control Lists (ACL_) on Linux, OS X and FreeBSD
    * BSD flags on OS X and FreeBSD

Which file types, attributes, etc. are *not* preserved?
    * UNIX domain sockets (because it does not make sense - they are meaningless
      without the running process that created them and the process needs to
      recreate them in any case). So, don't panic if your backup misses a UDS!
    * The precise on-disk representation of the holes in a sparse file.
      Archive creation has no special support for sparse files, holes are
      backed up up as (deduplicated and compressed) runs of zero bytes.
      Archive extraction has optional support to extract all-zero chunks as
      holes in a sparse file.

How can I specify the encryption passphrase programmatically?
    The encryption passphrase can be specified programmatically using the
    `BORG_PASSPHRASE` environment variable. This is convenient when setting up
    automated encrypted backups. Another option is to use
    key file based encryption with a blank passphrase. See
    :ref:`encrypted_repos` for more details.

When backing up to remote servers, is data encrypted before leaving the local machine, or do I have to trust that the remote server isn't malicious?
    Yes, everything is encrypted before leaving the local machine.

If a backup stops mid-way, does the already-backed-up data stay there? I.e. does |project_name| resume backups?
    Yes, during a backup a special checkpoint archive named ``<archive-name>.checkpoint`` is saved every 5 minutes
    containing all the data backed-up until that point. This means that at most 5 minutes worth of data needs to be
    retransmitted if a backup needs to be restarted.

If it crashes with a UnicodeError, what can I do?
    Check if your encoding is set correctly. For most POSIX-like systems, try::

        export LANG=en_US.UTF-8  # or similar, important is correct charset