[Borgbackup] borgbackup suggestion

[Alessandro Baggi]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to borgbackup and I'm planning to switch my home backup server 
based on bacula to borg. Then after trying it extensively I would like 
to replace some backup solution with borg if all will go as intented.

Why migrate from bacula: I used bacula for many years (> 5) and I found 
always the volume managing, pooling, recycling too much complicated and 
(in some way) not so robust when I need to run backup on disk and not on 
TAPE. Over this there is also problem like adding a new client, database 
cleaning, deduplication not available without pain, encrypted connection 
and encrypted archive. After several years I noticed that I need 
something simpler and pratical.

Currently in my LAN I need to backup one workstation (Linux Based), a 
NAS (Linux based), a virtual machine (data not raw image) and a remote VPS.

I have some questions:

1) About encryption what is more secure between repokey and keyfile?
2) About managing borg as a central solution. I explain. Using bacula I 
can run backup and restore from my server for a specified client. I 
noticed that with borg I need to connect to the client and run command 
for restore, run backup, run prune, search file, list backups, run check 
and so on. For operation like backup, prune and check cron could help 
(but this implies that I need to configure for each client a crontab) 
but for other operation I need a shell to the client. There is a way to 
perform all this operations from a single host? If this is not the right 
way to work with borgbackup I am open to any suggestion. I ask this 
because in the future I could have many machines to backup and a central 
way could save time.

3) About pruning repository with --append-only enabled. I read on a 
reddit post that with --append-only mode I can prune old jobs on repos 
from a trusted host and not run the prune command from the client but I 
don't understand how to do this when all information are stored on the 
client. So How I can prune a specific repository from a trusted machine?

Thank you in advance.