[Borgbackup] questions about append-only mode repository

[Thomas Waldmann]

The very fundamental problem we are running into here is:

"making sure the backups you have are all you need"

There are currently 2 solutions to this:

a) never switch off append-only (will use increasing amounts of space,
might run into scalability issues for huge archive counts and some
operations which are O(N_archives))

this of course assumes that you didn't make bad mistakes when creating
your backups, like forgetting some important stuff or backing up
inconsistent data or ...

b) make sure the backups you have are all you need - before leaving
append-only mode / actually deleting stuff

borg does not support you with b) except offering borg list
repo/archive, borg check and maybe some other basic operations.
you can see that as a missing feature or as just being out of scope.

I don't see append-only as negative as Marian (who seems to be rather
negative about borg in general since he stopped contributing a while ago
- after doing a lot in the past).

It needs to be used carefully, but we have some docs that describe how
to use append-only mode in case something bad happened. If these are not
sufficient: PRs welcome.

Ranting about append-only is not really helping as long as we have no
better alternative.

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