[Borgbackup] backup of home partition

[Felix Schwarz]

Am 16.09.18 um 14:58 schrieb Christian:
> What if I want to backup my entire home-partition? How does borg go
> about doing that?
> More specifically: Can I use my system during backup? Because when using
> it there will certainly be write-processes going on to certain files.
> Is there some kind of snapshot taken by borg before beginning to backup
> or am I not supposed to use my computer during backup?

I think there is not a yes/no answer to your question. Basically you are
asking for "a consistent state". borg will not do anything special so it will
just backup the files without trying to ensure consistency (but it can handle
vanishing files without crashing).

Consistent backups require external help (e.g. running a script before/after
the backup) because files are only part of the issue. If you want to backup a
database usually you need to run some DB-specific scripts (e.g. to dump the DB
as SQL file).

So if you really need a consistent backup state you need to run additional
scripts. For example LVM/btrfs can create file system snapshots.
Personally I can just ignore the problem for my desktop machines (now using
borg for quite a few years without problems).

Felix