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Comment by Mister_Snuggles | Hacker News Reader

What's your process for backing up to B2 using borg?

I'm currently doing borg backups to a local server, then using restic to back up my borg backups to B2. My reason for using restic over rclone is so that if the local backup is corrupted I've got history on the remote to fall back to.

I'm hoping to find a less cumbersome way to do this.

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Why not just use restic directly to back up?

That was my plan, but restic doesn't do compression so that would increase costs and backup time.

Some use-cases, like photo libraries, won't benefit much from compression, so I may use restic directly for those.

Rclone only uploads/overrides the remote if the meta-data (size/date/etc) shows a difference. Most disk corruption doesn't change these so it still works as a corruption backup.

I'm worried, in part, about files getting deleted. If I delete or otherwise lose my repository, rclone will helpfully delete it on the other side. Some amount of deletion is expected, like when borg prunes the old stuff out, so having rclone not delete anything might not be an option either.

I'm sure there are ways to manage this though, I just haven't figured them out yet.

Ah, looking more close, I'm just using rclone to put the backups on B2. So first I do a backup to a local drive, then I run `borg with-local ... rclone sync ...`.

Ah, ok. That's basically what I'm doing, except I'm using restic instead of rclone.

I've done borg for local backups for a while and figured I could just replace it with restic, then I discovered that restic doesn't do compression so I just pointed that at the borg repositories.

I'll probably use restic directly for things that don't benefit from compression and continue to use borg for things that do.

I'm open to better options though, layering two tools that basically do the same thing seems like a bit of a hack job.

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