Deduplicating Backups using Borg under NixOS (locally)
The goal
We want to have a way to automatically and reliable create backups of our data in NixOS. In my case I want to store the encrypted backups locally to upload them later on. There are also solutions to store the backups remotely like BorgBase and you can find instructions on how to set it up in the NixOS Wiki. We’ll keep it real simple and local here.
What is Borg
BorgBackup or in short Borg is a deduplicating backup program. For my use case it’s most important features are:
- Space efficient storage
- Speed
- Data encryption
- Compression
- Backups mountable as file system
- Easily configurable via NixOS options
- Free and Open Source Software
The Setup
I currently run on NixOS 23.11 (Darwin) with home-manager.
But I installed borgbackup in my environment.systemPackages.
I have spare hard drive in my computer that I want to use for saving my backups locally.