Borg vs restic: What are the differences?

Comparison Between Borg and restic

Borg and restic are both backup tools that offer important capabilities and features. However, they differ in several key aspects.

1. Performance: Borg excels in backup and restoration speed, especially for large data sets and incremental backups. It uses deduplication techniques and compression algorithms to optimize storage space and reduce the time required for backups and restores. On the other hand, restic prioritizes data integrity and security, which can sometimes impact the overall backup and restore performance.

2. Backup Strategy: Borg follows an incremental backup strategy, where only the changed or new data is backed up since the last backup. This is achieved using content-defined chunking and binary diff algorithms. In contrast, restic utilizes a snapshot-based backup strategy, creating a complete copy of the source data during each backup. While this ensures easier restore and data integrity verification, it can result in larger storage requirements for backups.

3. Storage Efficiency: Borg provides highly efficient storage usage through its deduplication and compression techniques. It avoids redundant storage of duplicate files, which significantly reduces the backup size. Moreover, Borg allows data to be encrypted before being stored, ensuring security and privacy. In contrast, restic focuses more on data integrity, supporting end-to-end encryption and ensuring that backups are not corrupted or tampered with. It does not provide deduplication features by default, which may lead to larger storage requirements.

4. Restore Flexibility: Borg offers flexible restore options, allowing users to restore full backups, individual files, or specific directories. It also supports browsing and mounting backups as a regular file system, providing easy access to different versions of backed-up files. Conversely, restic provides limited restore options and focuses more on creating consistent snapshots of data at a specific point in time.

5. Architecture and Deployment: Borg follows a centralized approach where a single server manages all backups and stores the data. It requires a server with a large amount of storage capacity and computational resources. In contrast, restic has a decentralized and distributed architecture, allowing backups to be stored on multiple servers or cloud storage providers. This decentralized approach enhances redundancy and fault tolerance.

6. Ease of Use and User Interface: Borg is a command-line tool that can be used efficiently through scripts and automation. While it may lack a graphical user interface, it offers extensive customization options and better control over backup jobs. On the other hand, restic provides a user-friendly command-line interface along with GUI options for more intuitive usage. It focuses on simplicity and ease of use for the less technically inclined users.

In summary, Borg and restic differ in performance optimization, backup strategies, storage efficiency, restore options, architecture, and user interface. Borg emphasizes speed, storage optimization, and granularity in restore options, while restic prioritizes data integrity, security, and user-friendly interfaces.