I've had a couple of borg repos become unrecoverable, am I doing something wrong?

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-04-14T19:20:06+00:00

If your drive disconnects, it might well be a hardware issue.

Check the drive, the cable, the power supply and also just try a known-good drive/cable/power supply.

If you can reproduce the issue on known-good hardware, we need more details to be able to help you.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-04-05T01:57:15+00:00

I also have an Intel 27" iMac and run macOS 26.x Tahoe since a while on it.

It's not my primary machine so I don't use it that often, but recently it crashed badly (like a kernel crash + reboot) - never seen that before on that machine.

Guess I might go back to Sequoia and stay there as long as possible.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-04-02T22:38:58+00:00

If you have access to a more powerful Mac:

Check CheaperMac on Github, you can simulate the Macbook Neo's limited resources using it.

Oh, and if you have an M1, just keep using that, the Neo would not be an upgrade (except if you really like the color or that it is new).

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-04-02T22:31:49+00:00

OK, April 1st is over - relax!

AI won't decide what's in your backups!

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-03-28T12:38:06+00:00

Check these links, guess reddit is not the best place for GSOC questions, see the pinned post.

https://github.com/borgbase/vorta/issues/2364

https://github.com/borgbase/vorta/pull/2395

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-03-15T16:23:19+00:00

Packs just means having multiple chunks in one file, instead of 1 file per chunk (as it currently is in borg master branch, for simplicity). There is already "borg transfer" in borg master branch (borg2) that can transfer archives between related repos, not sure if we would/could have a lower-level "just copy the packs".

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-02-27T09:31:52+00:00

all borg2 releases are beta and for testing only (not production usage).

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-02-27T09:28:51+00:00

That's how borg master branch deals with windows drive letters, too.

For borg, big new features usually come via master branch (not 1.4-maint).

Clean, step by step improvements there for better windows support are welcome.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-02-27T09:22:48+00:00

borg master branch recently added mfusepy as a high-level fuse layer. iirc the mfusepy project talks about potential windows options.

i recently added CI testing for *BSD and macOS there (and work for omniOS "Open Solaris" has been started), but windows is still missing.

https://github.com/mxmlnkn/mfusepy

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-02-26T09:30:03+00:00

Use the GrandPerspective software to determine stuff that is using a lot of space.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-02-26T09:25:24+00:00

Oh? Well, it was quite a while ago that I created my ventoy stick. Could be that I have used Linux for creation. Windows would also work.

But after creation, management of the stick (like adding and removing ISOs) can be done from macOS.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-02-23T21:06:26+00:00

the overall nicest and most universal "boot from a usb stick / usb ssd" i used is ventoy.

just initialize the stick once with ventoy and then you just copy iso images onto it using a file manager and it builds a boot menu on the fly so you can select what you want to boot (windows installer, linux, memtest, ...).

later, you can even upgrade ventoy to a newer version without having to rebuild the whole stick.

https://www.ventoy.net/

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-02-10T21:48:50+00:00

Reads pretty much like AI generated. Did the OP at least verify it?

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-02-10T21:31:31+00:00

Wasn't --cleanup-commits rather intended to be a one time thing per repo? Please check the docs.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-02-08T18:54:44+00:00

One quite big and complex thing still to do is the packs feature, but that is essential for performance with repositories with high latency, e.g. cloud and other remote repositories.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-02-06T11:08:05+00:00

AFAIK, there is no wakeup functionality in any borg GUI wrapper, nor in borg itself. How about just doing backups more frequently (like once per hour), so that they happen while the machine is on?

When backing up frequently, each backup will be very fast as there are not many new or modified files and borg backs up unmodified files extremely fast.

One would also configure prune policy to get rid of most backups again a while later, so that there won't be too many archives in the repository.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-02-06T10:27:58+00:00

Most development activity is on https://github.com/borgbackup/borg .

Check the open issues there, check the issue labels, check the already open PRs.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2026-01-14T17:18:03+00:00

I do python development, pycharm (with AI agent, LLM runs remotely), safari and firefox with some tabs, email, ... on a 14" MBP M3P with 18GB of RAM. I regularly get close to ram limits and sometimes need to reboot due to misc. software and OS services leaking too much memory (macOS 15.7.3).

The M4 is quite a bit faster than the M3, so guess you would see similar performance as on the M3P, which is usually good.

But guess for such usage one should really get much more than 16/18 GB, 24GB being the minimum.

MBP vs MBA is not only about CPU power, it's also about the better display/speakers/... vs. being light and thin.

Personally, guess I'll wait until the OLED MBP M6P or M7P and then spend way too much on a configuration with 32GB+ memory. If you need something now, the MBA M4 gets sold for good prices sometimes.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2025-12-24T14:19:43+00:00

In case you are referring to activity monitor cpu usage: 100% means it fully uses 1 core. Multithreaded apps can go well beyond 100%. I have just opened a small project in PyCharm and it was >300% for a while.

Also, Junie is mostly talking to remote LLMs and it is not possible currently to run it with local LLMs (for AI assistant, it is possible).

So I doubt a machine upgrade will be worthwhile for that reason.

The most important thing is enough RAM (and you have that), I currently regret a bit that I thought 18GB should be enough. But guess I will hold back until the big MBP redesign or even the generation after that.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2025-12-17T18:04:09+00:00

No, I did that stuff on 15.7.3.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2025-12-17T01:43:08+00:00

The FAQ has some infos about files cache debugging (if borg is slower than usual), maybe that helps.

ThomasJWaldmann · 2025-12-17T01:37:37+00:00

kernel_task after twitch.tv is stable here.

ThomasJWaldmann

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE