[Borgbackup] [Documentation] Remote/ local usage

[tmhikaru at gmail.com]

On Wed, Sep 07, 2016 at 08:58:57AM +0200, nerbrume at free.fr wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've just setup borg between a rather recent desktop machine (local), which is distantly backuped (ssh) on a very small box (something like a raspberry pi 1st gen, but with even less RAM).
> I didn't found in the documentation any reference as to which operations are done where (and what parameters I can act upon to lessen the burden on the slow distant machine).
> (btw, the doc is great !)
> 
> My main concerns are the CPU and RAM usage during backup (I guess disk usage would be of interest too, but I didn't found it to be the limiting factor) : 
> - where is the compression (lz4/gzip/lzma) done ?
> - where is the encryption (ssh + borg own encryption) done ?
> - where is the deduplication done ?

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.

Just my two cents.
Tim
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