System Backup and Restore

[lamyergeier]

I am using Borg2 on Ubuntu 22.04

I read the documentation on Quick Start — Borg - Deduplicating Archiver 2.0.0b5.dev3 documentation:

The user might be:

• root (if full backups, backups including system stuff or multiple users’ files were made)
• some specific user using sudo to execute borg as root
• some specific user (if backups of that user’s files were made)

I am doing a system backup of my own userfiles and files owned by root. So to backup, I do sudo while I am logged in as my username. I have following questions:

1. If I backup to an external drive (exfat, or ntfs) will the file permissions and other details be preserved? Or backing up to microsoft file system can lead to data lose?
2. When I need to restore do I need to run borg (extract or mount) again as sudo or do I need to do sudo -i?
3. To restore files owned by me do I need to do sudo, or without sudo it is possible?
4. Suppose I am backing data of about 600 GB to an external SSD. If I want to mount the archive, do I need additional 600 GB on the SSD?

[ThomasWaldmann]

Are you using borg 2? If not, please use the version selector to select the version you use.

1. it is not relevant on which fs you store the repo as long as the fs works correctly and reliably. borg has only very few requirements about the repo fs, which are also documented.
2. sudo -i sounds good (please verify it, i usually run borg via cron as root)
3. if you only restore files owned by your user/group, you do not need root permissions. otherwise you do. this is simply because as a user you can not chown/chgrp "away" from your own user/group.
4. for mounting you do not need (significant) additional space in the repo. you might need some temporary/caching space on the system running borg mount though.

[lamyergeier]

I am using Borg2 on Ubuntu 22.04

[ThomasWaldmann]

There's 2.0.0b4 out since last night (and you can also select the 2.0.0b4 or b3 from the docs version selector).