Comparison between Restic and Borg backup

Brief notes on a comparison I made between Restic and Borg on Sunday, October 10th, 2021.

  • Both make it easy to use a Grandfather-father-son backup scheme.
  • Both support encrypted backups.
  • Restic supports many different targets, including regular filesystems, SSH/SFTP targets and blob storage. Borg on the other hand only supports regular filesystems/SSH targets.
  • Borg supports compression using a variety of compression algorithms, Restic does not support this at all.
  • Borg assumes a backup repository is used exclusively by one system. Restic allows multiple systems to use the same repository, which would lead to much greater deduplication when those systems store the same data.
  • Borg performed faster for some people, slower for others. 12
  • Borg’s cache may be more efficient. 32
  • Borg uses considerably less memory. 314
  • Pruning operations in Borg are quick and efficient, with Restic these can take a long time and use a lot of memory. 145

  1. https://stickleback.dk/borg-or-restic/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-05-21-borg-vs-restic.html ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1875#issuecomment-556091569 ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/2446 ↩︎ ↩︎

  5. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/2162 ↩︎