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I might be wrong but I want to hear more from you if you're a Borg developer. My understanding is that you may be able to have multiple clients uploading chunks at the same time, but you won't be able to exploit cross-client deduplication if different clients have a similar set of files (OS files or a large code base for instance). Moreover, if your implementation require locks then it would be very hard to extend to cloud services.

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Yes, that's right, concurrent addition of the same chunks would generally mean that some work is wasted; so concurrent long running jobs would not synchronize well in this model, and lock-free performs clearly better there.

The only operation which inherently has to be guarded by a lock in Borg is inserting the archive pointer into the manifest (root object, see https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/latest/internals/data-s...). I suppose it would be possible to work around that without locking or to use the usual hacks around EC, put/get/check/get/check?put/get/check?put etc. until it's "probably there".

Deleting / pruning archives would still require a full lock due to the same conceptual issues that your two-phase GC avoids. The same goes for "check".

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