Borg mount and storage requirements

[lamyergeier]

I create borg backup in an external 1 TB hard-drive. My original data is about 700 GB in size.

If I mount an archive, do I need 700 GB of free space on my Laptop or on hard-drive? I was wondering if I don't have 700 GB of free space can I even mount an archive? Or mounting does not need any extra space and it utilizes the original space used by the repository in external hard-drive?

[ThomasWaldmann]

Mounting only needs a little space for caching.

But be aware that borg in general might need quite some (cache) space, e.g. for chunks.archive.d, see the FAQ.