Borg 1.2.4
Installation¶
There are different ways to install Borg:
Distribution Package - easy and fast if a package is available from your distribution.
Standalone Binary - easy and fast, we provide a ready-to-use binary file that comes bundled with all dependencies.
From Source, either:
Distribution Package¶
Some distributions might offer a ready-to-use borgbackup
package which can be installed with the package manager.
Important
Those packages may not be up to date with the latest Borg releases. Before submitting a bug report, check the package version and compare that to our latest release then review Important notes to see if the bug has been fixed. Report bugs to the package maintainer rather than directly to Borg if the package is out of date in the distribution.
Distribution |
Source |
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Alpine Linux |
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Arch Linux |
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Debian |
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Gentoo |
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GNU Guix |
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Fedora/RHEL |
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FreeBSD |
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macOS |
brew install borgbackup (official formula, no FUSE support)or
brew install --cask macfuse (private Tap, FUSE support)brew install borgbackup/tap/borgbackup-fuse |
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Mageia |
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NetBSD |
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NixOS |
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OpenBSD |
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OpenIndiana |
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openSUSE |
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Raspbian |
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Ubuntu |
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Please ask package maintainers to build a package or, if you can package / submit it yourself, please help us with that! See #105 on github to followup on packaging efforts.
Current status of package in the repositories
Standalone Binary¶
Note
Releases are signed with an OpenPGP key, see Security for more instructions.
Borg x86/x64 amd/intel compatible binaries (generated with pyinstaller) are available on the releases page for the following platforms:
Linux: glibc >= 2.28 (ok for most supported Linux releases). Older glibc releases are untested and may not work.
MacOS: 10.12 or newer (To avoid signing issues download the file via command line or remove the
quarantineattribute after downloading:$ xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine borg-macosx64.tgz)FreeBSD: 12.1 (unknown whether it works for older releases)
ARM binaries are built by Johann Bauer, see: https://borg.bauerj.eu/
To install such a binary, just drop it into a directory in your PATH,
make borg readable and executable for its users and then you can run borg:
sudo cp borg-linux64 /usr/local/bin/borg
sudo chown root:root /usr/local/bin/borg
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/borg
Optionally you can create a symlink to have borgfs available, which is an
alias for borg mount:
ln -s /usr/local/bin/borg /usr/local/bin/borgfs
Note that the binary uses /tmp to unpack Borg with all dependencies. It will
fail if /tmp has not enough free space or is mounted with the noexec
option. You can change the temporary directory by setting the TEMP
environment variable before running Borg.
If a new version is released, you will have to manually download it and replace the old version using the same steps as shown above.
From Source¶
Note
Some older Linux systems (like RHEL/CentOS 5) and Python interpreter binaries compiled to be able to run on such systems (like Python installed via Anaconda) might miss functions required by Borg.
This issue will be detected early and Borg will abort with a fatal error.
Dependencies¶
To install Borg from a source package (including pip), you have to install the following dependencies first:
Python 3 >= 3.8.0, plus development headers.
OpenSSL >= 1.0.0, plus development headers.
libacl (which depends on libattr), both plus development headers.
We have bundled code of the following packages, but borg by default (see setup.py if you want to change that) prefers a shared library if it can be found on the system (lib + dev headers) at build time:
pkg-config (cli tool) and pkgconfig python package (borg uses these to discover header and library location - if it can’t import pkgconfig and is not pointed to header/library locations via env vars [see setup.py], it will fall back to using the bundled code, see above). These must be present before invoking setup.py!
some other Python dependencies, pip will automatically install them for you.
optionally, if you wish to mount an archive as a FUSE filesystem, you need a FUSE implementation for Python:
If you have troubles finding the right package names, have a look at the distribution specific sections below or the Vagrantfile in the git repository, which contains installation scripts for a number of operating systems.
In the following, the steps needed to install the dependencies are listed for a selection of platforms. If your distribution is not covered by these instructions, try to use your package manager to install the dependencies. On FreeBSD, you may need to get a recent enough OpenSSL version from FreeBSD ports.
After you have installed the dependencies, you can proceed with steps outlined under Using pip.
Debian / Ubuntu¶
Install the dependencies with development headers:
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev python3-pip python3-virtualenv \
libacl1-dev libacl1 \
libssl-dev \
liblz4-dev libzstd-dev libxxhash-dev \
build-essential \
pkg-config python3-pkgconfig
sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev fuse # needed for llfuse
sudo apt-get install libfuse3-dev fuse3 # needed for pyfuse3
In case you get complaints about permission denied on /etc/fuse.conf: on
Ubuntu this means your user is not in the fuse group. Add yourself to that
group, log out and log in again.
Fedora¶
Install the dependencies with development headers:
sudo dnf install python3 python3-devel python3-pip python3-virtualenv \
libacl-devel libacl \
openssl-devel \
lz4-devel libzstd-devel xxhash-devel \
pkgconf python3-pkgconfig
sudo dnf install gcc gcc-c++ redhat-rpm-config
sudo dnf install fuse-devel fuse # needed for llfuse
sudo dnf install fuse3-devel fuse3 # needed for pyfuse3
openSUSE Tumbleweed / Leap¶
Install the dependencies automatically using zypper:
sudo zypper source-install --build-deps-only borgbackup
Alternatively, you can enumerate all build dependencies in the command line:
sudo zypper install python3 python3-devel \
libacl-devel openssl-devel \
libxxhash-devel \
python3-Cython python3-Sphinx python3-msgpack-python python3-pkgconfig pkgconf \
python3-pytest python3-setuptools python3-setuptools_scm \
python3-sphinx_rtd_theme gcc gcc-c++
sudo zypper install python3-llfuse # llfuse
macOS¶
When installing via Homebrew, dependencies are installed automatically. To install dependencies manually:
brew install python3 openssl zstd lz4 xxhash
brew install pkg-config
pip3 install virtualenv pkgconfig
For FUSE support to mount the backup archives, you need at least version 3.0 of macFUSE, which is available via github, or Homebrew:
brew install --cask macfuse
When installing Borg via pip, be sure to install the llfuse extra,
since macFUSE only supports FUSE API v2. Also, since Homebrew won’t link
the installed openssl formula, point pkg-config to the correct path:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/openssl@1.1/lib/pkgconfig" pip install borgbackup[llfuse]
For OS X Catalina and later, be aware that you must authorize full disk access. It is no longer sufficient to run borg backups as root. If you have not yet granted full disk access, and you run Borg backup from cron, you will see messages such as:
/Users/you/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary: scandir: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted:
To fix this problem, you should grant full disk access to cron, and to your Terminal application. More information can be found here.
FreeBSD¶
Listed below are packages you will need to install Borg, its dependencies, and commands to make FUSE work for using the mount command.
pkg install -y python3 pkgconf
pkg install openssl
pkg install liblz4 zstd xxhash
pkg install fusefs-libs # needed for llfuse
pkg install -y git
python3 -m ensurepip # to install pip for Python3
To use the mount command:
echo 'fuse_load="YES"' >> /boot/loader.conf
echo 'vfs.usermount=1' >> /etc/sysctl.conf
kldload fuse
sysctl vfs.usermount=1
Windows 10’s Linux Subsystem¶
Note
Running under Windows 10’s Linux Subsystem is experimental and has not been tested much yet.
Just follow the Ubuntu Linux installation steps. You can omit the FUSE stuff, it won’t work anyway.
Cygwin¶
Note
Running under Cygwin is experimental and has not been tested much yet.
Use the Cygwin installer to install the dependencies:
python38 python38-devel python38-pkgconfig
python38-setuptools python38-pip python38-wheel python38-virtualenv
libssl-devel libxxhash-devel liblz4-devel libzstd-devel
binutils gcc-g++ git make openssh
Using pip¶
Ensure to install the dependencies as described within From Source.
Virtualenv can be used to build and install Borg without affecting the system Python or requiring root access. Using a virtual environment is optional, but recommended except for the most simple use cases.
Note
If you install into a virtual environment, you need to activate it
first (source borg-env/bin/activate), before running borg.
Alternatively, symlink borg-env/bin/borg into some directory that is in
your PATH so you can just run borg.
This will use pip to install the latest release from PyPi:
virtualenv --python=python3 borg-env
source borg-env/bin/activate
# might be required if your tools are outdated
pip install -U pip setuptools wheel
# pkgconfig MUST be available before borg is installed!
pip install pkgconfig
# install Borg + Python dependencies into virtualenv
pip install borgbackup
# or alternatively (if you want FUSE support):
pip install borgbackup[llfuse] # to use llfuse
pip install borgbackup[pyfuse3] # to use pyfuse3
To upgrade Borg to a new version later, run the following after activating your virtual environment:
pip install -U borgbackup # or ... borgbackup[llfuse/pyfuse3]
When doing manual pip installation, man pages are not automatically installed. You can run these commands to install the man pages locally:
# get borg from github
git clone https://github.com/borgbackup/borg.git borg
# Install the files with proper permissions
install -D -m 0644 borg/docs/man/borg*.1* $HOME/.local/share/man/man1/borg.1
# Update the man page cache
mandb
Using git¶
Ensure to install the dependencies as described within From Source.
This uses latest, unreleased development code from git. While we try not to break master, there are no guarantees on anything.
# get borg from github
git clone https://github.com/borgbackup/borg.git
# create a virtual environment
virtualenv --python=$(which python3) borg-env
source borg-env/bin/activate # always before using!
# install borg + dependencies into virtualenv
cd borg
pip install -r requirements.d/development.txt
pip install -r requirements.d/docs.txt # optional, to build the docs
pip install -e . # in-place editable mode
or
pip install -e .[pyfuse3] # in-place editable mode, use pyfuse3
or
pip install -e .[llfuse] # in-place editable mode, use llfuse
# optional: run all the tests, on all installed Python versions
# requires fakeroot, available through your package manager
fakeroot -u tox --skip-missing-interpreters
By default the system installation of python will be used.
If you need to use a different version of Python you can install this using pyenv:
...
# create a virtual environment
pyenv install 3.8.0 # minimum, preferably use something more recent!
pyenv global 3.8.0
pyenv local 3.8.0
virtualenv --python=${pyenv which python} borg-env
source borg-env/bin/activate # always before using!
...
Note
As a developer or power user, you always want to use a virtual environment.