BORG-CREATE(1) borg backup tool BORG-CREATE(1)
NAME
borg-create - Create new archive
SYNOPSIS
borg [common options] create [options] ARCHIVE [PATH...]
DESCRIPTION
This command creates a backup archive containing all files found while
recursively traversing all paths specified. Paths are added to the ar-
chive as they are given, that means if relative paths are desired, the
command has to be run from the correct directory.
When giving '-' as path, borg will read data from standard input and
create a file 'stdin' in the created archive from that data. In some
cases it's more appropriate to use --content-from-command, however. See
section Reading from stdin below for details.
The archive will consume almost no disk space for files or parts of
files that have already been stored in other archives.
The archive name needs to be unique. It must not end in '.checkpoint'
or '.checkpoint.N' (with N being a number), because these names are
used for checkpoints and treated in special ways.
In the archive name, you may use the following placeholders: {now},
{utcnow}, {fqdn}, {hostname}, {user} and some others.
Backup speed is increased by not reprocessing files that are already
part of existing archives and weren't modified. The detection of unmod-
ified files is done by comparing multiple file metadata values with
previous values kept in the files cache.
This comparison can operate in different modes as given by
--files-cache:
• ctime,size,inode (default)
• mtime,size,inode (default behaviour of borg versions older than
1.1.0rc4)
• ctime,size (ignore the inode number)
• mtime,size (ignore the inode number)
• rechunk,ctime (all files are considered modified - rechunk, cache
ctime)
• rechunk,mtime (all files are considered modified - rechunk, cache
mtime)
• disabled (disable the files cache, all files considered modified -
rechunk)
inode number: better safety, but often unstable on network filesystems
Normally, detecting file modifications will take inode information into
consideration to improve the reliability of file change detection.
This is problematic for files located on sshfs and similar network file
systems which do not provide stable inode numbers, such files will al-
ways be considered modified. You can use modes without inode in this
case to improve performance, but reliability of change detection might
be reduced.
ctime vs. mtime: safety vs. speed
• ctime is a rather safe way to detect changes to a file (metadata and
contents) as it can not be set from userspace. But, a metadata-only
change will already update the ctime, so there might be some unneces-
sary chunking/hashing even without content changes. Some filesystems
do not support ctime (change time). E.g. doing a chown or chmod to a
file will change its ctime.
• mtime usually works and only updates if file contents were changed.
But mtime can be arbitrarily set from userspace, e.g. to set mtime
back to the same value it had before a content change happened. This
can be used maliciously as well as well-meant, but in both cases
mtime based cache modes can be problematic.
The mount points of filesystems or filesystem snapshots should be the
same for every creation of a new archive to ensure fast operation. This
is because the file cache that is used to determine changed files
quickly uses absolute filenames. If this is not possible, consider
creating a bind mount to a stable location.
The --progress option shows (from left to right) Original, Compressed
and Deduplicated (O, C and D, respectively), then the Number of files
(N) processed so far, followed by the currently processed path.
When using --stats, you will get some statistics about how much data
was added - the "This Archive" deduplicated size there is most inter-
esting as that is how much your repository will grow. Please note that
the "All archives" stats refer to the state after creation. Also, the
--stats and --dry-run options are mutually exclusive because the data
is not actually compressed and deduplicated during a dry run.
For more help on include/exclude patterns, see the borg_patterns com-
mand output.
For more help on placeholders, see the borg_placeholders command out-
put.
OPTIONS
See borg-common(1) for common options of Borg commands.
arguments
ARCHIVE
name of archive to create (must be also a valid directory name)
PATH paths to archive
options
-n, --dry-run
do not create a backup archive
-s, --stats
print statistics for the created archive
--list output verbose list of items (files, dirs, ...)
--filter STATUSCHARS
only display items with the given status characters (see de-
scription)
--json output stats as JSON. Implies --stats.
--no-cache-sync
experimental: do not synchronize the cache. Implies not using
the files cache.
--stdin-name NAME
use NAME in archive for stdin data (default: 'stdin')
--stdin-user USER
set user USER in archive for stdin data (default: 'root')
--stdin-group GROUP
set group GROUP in archive for stdin data (default: 'wheel')
--stdin-mode M
set mode to M in archive for stdin data (default: 0660)
--content-from-command
interpret PATH as command and store its stdout. See also section
Reading from stdin below.
--paths-from-stdin
read DELIM-separated list of paths to backup from stdin. Will
not recurse into directories.
--paths-from-command
interpret PATH as command and treat its output as
--paths-from-stdin
--paths-delimiter DELIM
set path delimiter for --paths-from-stdin and --paths-from-com-
mand (default: n)
Exclusion options
-e PATTERN, --exclude PATTERN
exclude paths matching PATTERN
--exclude-from EXCLUDEFILE
read exclude patterns from EXCLUDEFILE, one per line
--pattern PATTERN
include/exclude paths matching PATTERN
--patterns-from PATTERNFILE
read include/exclude patterns from PATTERNFILE, one per line
--exclude-caches
exclude directories that contain a CACHEDIR.TAG file (-
http://www.bford.info/cachedir/spec.html)
--exclude-if-present NAME
exclude directories that are tagged by containing a filesystem
object with the given NAME
--keep-exclude-tags
if tag objects are specified with --exclude-if-present, don't
omit the tag objects themselves from the backup archive
--exclude-nodump
exclude files flagged NODUMP
Filesystem options
-x, --one-file-system
stay in the same file system and do not store mount points of
other file systems. This might behave different from your ex-
pectations, see the docs.
--numeric-owner
deprecated, use --numeric-ids instead
--numeric-ids
only store numeric user and group identifiers
--noatime
do not store atime into archive
--atime
do store atime into archive
--noctime
do not store ctime into archive
--nobirthtime
do not store birthtime (creation date) into archive
--nobsdflags
deprecated, use --noflags instead
--noflags
do not read and store flags (e.g. NODUMP, IMMUTABLE) into ar-
chive
--noacls
do not read and store ACLs into archive
--noxattrs
do not read and store xattrs into archive
--sparse
detect sparse holes in input (supported only by fixed chunker)
--files-cache MODE
operate files cache in MODE. default: ctime,size,inode
--read-special
open and read block and char device files as well as FIFOs as if
they were regular files. Also follows symlinks pointing to these
kinds of files.
Archive options
--comment COMMENT
add a comment text to the archive
--timestamp TIMESTAMP
manually specify the archive creation date/time (UTC,
yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss format). Alternatively, give a reference
file/directory.
-c SECONDS, --checkpoint-interval SECONDS
write checkpoint every SECONDS seconds (Default: 1800)
--chunker-params PARAMS
specify the chunker parameters (ALGO, CHUNK_MIN_EXP,
CHUNK_MAX_EXP, HASH_MASK_BITS, HASH_WINDOW_SIZE). default:
buzhash,19,23,21,4095
-C COMPRESSION, --compression COMPRESSION
select compression algorithm, see the output of the "borg help
compression" command for details.
EXAMPLES
# Backup ~/Documents into an archive named "my-documents"
$ borg create /path/to/repo::my-documents ~/Documents
# same, but list all files as we process them
$ borg create --list /path/to/repo::my-documents ~/Documents
# Backup ~/Documents and ~/src but exclude pyc files
$ borg create /path/to/repo::my-files \
~/Documents \
~/src \
--exclude '*.pyc'
# Backup home directories excluding image thumbnails (i.e. only
# /home/<one directory>/.thumbnails is excluded, not /home/*/*/.thumbnails etc.)
$ borg create /path/to/repo::my-files /home \
--exclude 'sh:home/*/.thumbnails'
# Backup the root filesystem into an archive named "root-YYYY-MM-DD"
# use zlib compression (good, but slow) - default is lz4 (fast, low compression ratio)
$ borg create -C zlib,6 --one-file-system /path/to/repo::root-{now:%Y-%m-%d} /
# Backup onto a remote host ("push" style) via ssh to port 2222,
# logging in as user "borg" and storing into /path/to/repo
$ borg create ssh://borg@backup.example.org:2222/path/to/repo::{fqdn}-root-{now} /
# Backup a remote host locally ("pull" style) using sshfs
$ mkdir sshfs-mount
$ sshfs root@example.com:/ sshfs-mount
$ cd sshfs-mount
$ borg create /path/to/repo::example.com-root-{now:%Y-%m-%d} .
$ cd ..
$ fusermount -u sshfs-mount
# Make a big effort in fine granular deduplication (big chunk management
# overhead, needs a lot of RAM and disk space, see formula in internals
# docs - same parameters as borg < 1.0 or attic):
$ borg create --chunker-params buzhash,10,23,16,4095 /path/to/repo::small /smallstuff
# Backup a raw device (must not be active/in use/mounted at that time)
$ borg create --read-special --chunker-params fixed,4194304 /path/to/repo::my-sdx /dev/sdX
# Backup a sparse disk image (must not be active/in use/mounted at that time)
$ borg create --sparse --chunker-params fixed,4194304 /path/to/repo::my-disk my-disk.raw
# No compression (none)
$ borg create --compression none /path/to/repo::arch ~
# Super fast, low compression (lz4, default)
$ borg create /path/to/repo::arch ~
# Less fast, higher compression (zlib, N = 0..9)
$ borg create --compression zlib,N /path/to/repo::arch ~
# Even slower, even higher compression (lzma, N = 0..9)
$ borg create --compression lzma,N /path/to/repo::arch ~
# Only compress compressible data with lzma,N (N = 0..9)
$ borg create --compression auto,lzma,N /path/to/repo::arch ~
# Use short hostname, user name and current time in archive name
$ borg create /path/to/repo::{hostname}-{user}-{now} ~
# Similar, use the same datetime format that is default as of borg 1.1
$ borg create /path/to/repo::{hostname}-{user}-{now:%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S} ~
# As above, but add nanoseconds
$ borg create /path/to/repo::{hostname}-{user}-{now:%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f} ~
# Backing up relative paths by moving into the correct directory first
$ cd /home/user/Documents
# The root directory of the archive will be "projectA"
$ borg create /path/to/repo::daily-projectA-{now:%Y-%m-%d} projectA
# Use external command to determine files to archive
# Use --paths-from-stdin with find to only backup files less than 1MB in size
$ find ~ -size -1000k | borg create --paths-from-stdin /path/to/repo::small-files-only
# Use --paths-from-command with find to only backup files from a given user
$ borg create --paths-from-command /path/to/repo::joes-files -- find /srv/samba/shared -user joe
# Use --paths-from-stdin with --paths-delimiter (for example, for filenames with newlines in them)
$ find ~ -size -1000k -print0 | borg create \
--paths-from-stdin \
--paths-delimiter "\0" \
/path/to/repo::smallfiles-handle-newline
NOTES
The --exclude patterns are not like tar. In tar --exclude .bundler/gems
will exclude foo/.bundler/gems. In borg it will not, you need to use
--exclude '*/.bundler/gems' to get the same effect.
In addition to using --exclude patterns, it is possible to use --ex-
clude-if-present to specify the name of a filesystem object (e.g. a
file or folder name) which, when contained within another folder, will
prevent the containing folder from being backed up. By default, the
containing folder and all of its contents will be omitted from the
backup. If, however, you wish to only include the objects specified by
--exclude-if-present in your backup, and not include any other contents
of the containing folder, this can be enabled through using the
--keep-exclude-tags option.
The -x or --one-file-system option excludes directories, that are
mountpoints (and everything in them). It detects mountpoints by com-
paring the device number from the output of stat() of the directory and
its parent directory. Specifically, it excludes directories for which
stat() reports a device number different from the device number of
their parent. Be aware that in Linux (and possibly elsewhere) there are
directories with device number different from their parent, which the
kernel does not consider a mountpoint and also the other way around.
Examples are bind mounts (possibly same device number, but always a
mountpoint) and ALL subvolumes of a btrfs (different device number from
parent but not necessarily a mountpoint). Therefore when using
--one-file-system, one should make doubly sure that the backup works as
intended especially when using btrfs. This is even more important, if
the btrfs layout was created by someone else, e.g. a distribution in-
staller.
Item flags
--list outputs a list of all files, directories and other file system
items it considered (no matter whether they had content changes or
not). For each item, it prefixes a single-letter flag that indicates
type and/or status of the item.
If you are interested only in a subset of that output, you can give
e.g. --filter=AME and it will only show regular files with A, M or E
status (see below).
A uppercase character represents the status of a regular file relative
to the "files" cache (not relative to the repo -- this is an issue if
the files cache is not used). Metadata is stored in any case and for
'A' and 'M' also new data chunks are stored. For 'U' all data chunks
refer to already existing chunks.
• 'A' = regular file, added (see also a_status_oddity in the FAQ)
• 'M' = regular file, modified
• 'U' = regular file, unchanged
• 'C' = regular file, it changed while we backed it up
• 'E' = regular file, an error happened while accessing/reading this
file
A lowercase character means a file type other than a regular file, borg
usually just stores their metadata:
• 'd' = directory
• 'b' = block device
• 'c' = char device
• 'h' = regular file, hardlink (to already seen inodes)
• 's' = symlink
• 'f' = fifo
Other flags used include:
• 'i' = backup data was read from standard input (stdin)
• '-' = dry run, item was not backed up
• 'x' = excluded, item was not backed up
• '?' = missing status code (if you see this, please file a bug re-
port!)
Reading from stdin
There are two methods to read from stdin. Either specify - as path and
pipe directly to borg:
backup-vm --id myvm --stdout | borg create REPO::ARCHIVE -
Or use --content-from-command to have Borg manage the execution of the
command and piping. If you do so, the first PATH argument is inter-
preted as command to execute and any further arguments are treated as
arguments to the command:
borg create --content-from-command REPO::ARCHIVE -- backup-vm --id myvm --stdout
-- is used to ensure --id and --stdout are not considered arguments to
borg but rather backup-vm.
The difference between the two approaches is that piping to borg cre-
ates an archive even if the command piping to borg exits with a fail-
ure. In this case, one can end up with truncated output being backed
up. Using --content-from-command, in contrast, borg is guaranteed to
fail without creating an archive should the command fail. The command
is considered failed when it returned a non-zero exit code.
Reading from stdin yields just a stream of data without file metadata
associated with it, and the files cache is not needed at all. So it is
safe to disable it via --files-cache disabled and speed up backup cre-
ation a bit.
By default, the content read from stdin is stored in a file called
'stdin'. Use --stdin-name to change the name.
SEE ALSO
borg-common(1), borg-delete(1), borg-prune(1), borg-check(1), borg-pat-
terns(1), borg-placeholders(1), borg-compression(1)
AUTHOR
The Borg Collective
2023-03-22 BORG-CREATE(1)
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