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use titles instead of definitions in FAQ

this way the titles show up in the table of contents and we can link
to individual entries
This commit is contained in:
Antoine Beaupré 2015-10-19 11:12:14 -04:00
parent 500c2a8a20
commit b122fca580

View file

@ -5,11 +5,15 @@ Frequently asked questions
==========================
Can I backup VM disk images?
----------------------------
Yes, the `deduplication`_ technique used by
|project_name| makes sure only the modified parts of the file are stored.
Also, we have optional simple sparse file support for extract.
Can I backup from multiple servers into a single repository?
------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, but in order for the deduplication used by |project_name| to work, it
needs to keep a local cache containing checksums of all file
chunks already stored in the repository. This cache is stored in
@ -23,6 +27,8 @@ Can I backup from multiple servers into a single repository?
or deleting archives, which may make *simultaneous* backups fail.
Which file types, attributes, etc. are preserved?
-------------------------------------------------
* Directories
* Regular files
* Hardlinks (considering all files in the same archive)
@ -40,6 +46,8 @@ Which file types, attributes, etc. are preserved?
* BSD flags on OS X and FreeBSD
Which file types, attributes, etc. are *not* preserved?
-------------------------------------------------------
* UNIX domain sockets (because it does not make sense - they are
meaningless without the running process that created them and the process
needs to recreate them in any case). So, don't panic if your backup
@ -50,8 +58,8 @@ Which file types, attributes, etc. are *not* preserved?
Archive extraction has optional support to extract all-zero chunks as
holes in a sparse file.
Why is my backup bigger than with attic?
Why doesn't |project_name| do compression by default?
Why is my backup bigger than with attic? Why doesn't |project_name| do compression by default?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* attic was rather unflexible when it comes to compression, it always
compressed using zlib level 6 (no way to switch compression off or
@ -63,6 +71,8 @@ Why doesn't |project_name| do compression by default?
level you want to use. This is why compression defaults to none.
How can I specify the encryption passphrase programmatically?
-------------------------------------------------------------
The encryption passphrase can be specified programmatically using the
`BORG_PASSPHRASE` environment variable. This is convenient when setting up
automated encrypted backups. Another option is to use
@ -70,37 +80,52 @@ How can I specify the encryption passphrase programmatically?
:ref:`encrypted_repos` for more details.
When backing up to remote encrypted repos, is encryption done locally?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, file and directory metadata and data is locally encrypted, before
leaving the local machine. We do not mean the transport layer encryption
by that, but the data/metadata itself. Transport layer encryption (e.g.
when ssh is used as a transport) applies additionally.
When backing up to remote servers, do I have to trust the remote server?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes and No.
No, as far as data confidentiality is concerned - if you use encryption,
all your files/dirs data and metadata are stored in their encrypted form
into the repository.
Yes, as an attacker with access to the remote server could delete (or
otherwise make unavailable) all your backups.
If a backup stops mid-way, does the already-backed-up data stay there?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, |project_name| supports resuming backups.
During a backup a special checkpoint archive named ``<archive-name>.checkpoint``
is saved every checkpoint interval (the default value for this is 5
minutes) containing all the data backed-up until that point. This means
that at most <checkpoint interval> worth of data needs to be retransmitted
if a backup needs to be restarted.
Once your backup has finished successfully, you can delete all ``*.checkpoint``
archives.
If it crashes with a UnicodeError, what can I do?
-------------------------------------------------
Check if your encoding is set correctly. For most POSIX-like systems, try::
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 # or similar, important is correct charset
I can't extract non-ascii filenames by giving them on the commandline!?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This might be due to different ways to represent some characters in unicode
or due to other non-ascii encoding issues.
If you run into that, try this:
- avoid the non-ascii characters on the commandline by e.g. extracting
@ -108,6 +133,8 @@ I can't extract non-ascii filenames by giving them on the commandline!?
- mount the repo using FUSE and use some file manager
Can |project_name| add redundancy to the backup data to deal with hardware malfunction?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No, it can't. While that at first sounds like a good idea to defend against
some defect HDD sectors or SSD flash blocks, dealing with this in a
reliable way needs a lot of low-level storage layout information and
@ -119,12 +146,16 @@ Can |project_name| add redundancy to the backup data to deal with hardware malfu
See also `ticket 225 <https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/225>`_.
Can |project_name| verify data integrity of a backup archive?
-------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, if you want to detect accidental data damage (like bit rot), use the
``check`` operation. It will notice corruption using CRCs and hashes.
If you want to be able to detect malicious tampering also, use a encrypted
repo. It will then be able to check using CRCs and HMACs.
Why was Borg forked from Attic?
-------------------------------
Borg was created in May 2015 in response to the difficulty of getting new
code or larger changes incorporated into Attic and establishing a bigger
developer community / more open development.