[Borgbackup] Multiple clients to a single repo considerations

[archont]

Hi,

About get some automation to my home network PCs backup. That is: attach one HDD to my 24/7 server, run borgmatic overnight (server) or when powered on for some time (HTPC, desktop). Then, rclone to Backblaze B2. About 2 TB (deduplicated) in total. All Linux computers. I use repokey and have a separate backup of both passphrase and key.

Now it comes to some security considerations:

* Single REPO for all computers is acceptable: it is only me who will recover data from archives.

* Borg docs say that it is not a good idea to have multiple remote clients accessing the same BORG_REPO, because local cache gets invalidated any time REPO is accessed by other client (cache rebuilding is slow) and multiple backups cannot run in parallel (I can live with that).

* What is worse, Borg docs also say: When ... multiple clients independently updating the same repository, then Borg fails to provide confidentiality...


Now, to resolve the issue with rebuilding the cache and the lack of confidentiality, how about this solution:

* Run borgmatic (or `borg create` if that matters) individually on each computer, and share a single BORG_BASE_DIR (i.e. cache and configs) from server via SMB; BORG_REPO would still be accessed via `borg serve` remotely, even when backing up the server itself (via localhost loopback). the BORG_REPO location would always be the same as 'root at server:/path/to/repo'.


**Would that resolve the limitations described in Borg docs?**

Regards,
Archont