BorgBackup is a free, open-source command-line backup tool with content-defined deduplication, compression, and authenticated encryption for Linux, macOS, and…
BorgBackup is a free, open-source deduplicating archiver for Linux, macOS, and BSD systems. It was forked from the Attic project in May 2015 by a group of contributors seeking faster, more open development, and reached its 1.0 release in March 2016.
Borg has no company or commercial entity behind it — it is maintained by an open-source community under the BSD 3-clause license, distributed via GitHub, package managers, and PyPI.
Borg's defining feature is content-defined chunking deduplication, which splits files into variable-length chunks and stores each unique chunk only once across all backups in a repository. This makes repeated daily backups of large, mostly-unchanged data sets remarkably storage-efficient.
All data is encrypted and authenticated client-side using 256-bit AES-OCB or ChaCha20-Poly1305 before it ever leaves the source machine, so backup destinations never see unencrypted data. Borg also supports several compression algorithms (lz4, zstd, zlib, lzma) and lets users mount any archive as a browsable filesystem via FUSE.
BorgBackup itself is entirely free and open source with no paid tiers, license fees, or subscriptions. The only cost involved is whatever storage destination a user chooses — a local disk, NAS, self-managed server, or a Borg-compatible hosting service such as BorgBase or rsync.net.
Yes. BorgBackup is free, open-source software licensed under BSD 3-clause with no paid tiers or subscriptions.
Not natively. Borg officially supports Linux, macOS, and BSD; Windows users typically run it inside WSL.
Borg was forked from Attic in 2015 to enable faster, more open community development, and has since diverged with additional features and active maintenance, while Attic development stalled.
No. It works over standard SSH to any remote host with Borg installed, or to Borg-compatible hosting providers like BorgBase and rsync.net.
Core Borg is command-line only, but third-party front ends such as Vorta (macOS/Linux) and Borgmatic (scheduling/config) add GUI or higher-level tooling on top of it.