[Borgbackup] [Documentation] Remote/ local usage

[nerbrume at free.fr]

Hello,

> Taking it from someone who tried using borg to do backups from an
> rpiB1
> client to a powerful server, these are all operations that are done
> client
> side, and in theory should work in your described scenario though you
> will
> get a bit of a speed hit with I/O.  ...  Just don't try to use it the
> other
> way around, it just does not work well trying to run the client on a
> weak
> machine, when it works at all.  I never did figure out why it kept
> inexplicably hanging forever.
> 
> If you have problems with server side operations taking forever,
> never
> completing or running out of memory, you may want to try using sshfs
> instead
> of a more typical borg over ssh login.  Using sshfs will allow you to
> access
> the remote repo via borg as if it was locally present on the client
> machine,
> and will not require borg to be installed or run on the server.  It
> will
> require quite a bit more computation out of ssh than normal, but in
> practice
> I found that making the weak machines files accessable via sshfs
> *greatly*
> sped things up compared to having it run the program over an ssh
> login.
> 
> As an alternative, you may want to consider rsync if borg does not
> work out
> for you.  Although it does not support backing up selinux xattrs,
> doesn't
> have a way to encrypt files, and doesn't have the deduplication
> awesomeness
> of borg, on a weaker machine it actually works where borg cannot.
>  You can
> even have it use hardlinks to do incremental backups, though this
> requires
> semicomplicated scripting.  I personally had to revert to using rsync
> for my
> backups because I could not expect borg to work on the weak client
> machine -
> it hardly did me any good to have a backup that could not be
> restored.
> Luckily in your case it sounds like this won't be a problem.

I might not have been clear on my setup : the "fast" machine has the data, and is doing the "borg create ssh://user@slow-machine".
I'm currently probably limited by the slow machine CPU, but not by borg, as the backup folder is on a cryptfs encrypted usb drive. Before using borg, I was already using rsync, with the same limitation (I had a slightly higher I/O, thought).
But thanks for the sshfs trick, it might prove useful at some point !
N.