Borg vs restic
A side-by-side feature comparison.
Summary
Borg and restic are the two leading open-source deduplicating backup formats. Both chunk data, deduplicate by content hash, and encrypt before upload. Borg is older and faster; restic is newer, written in Go, and supports more remote storage backends out of the box.
Feature comparison
| Feature | BorgBackup | restic |
|---|---|---|
| Language | Python (C inner loops) | Go |
| Dedup chunk size | Variable | Variable (CDC) |
| Encryption | Authenticated AES-256 | AES-256 + Poly1305 |
| Backends | Local, SSH | Local, SFTP, S3, B2, Azure, GCS, REST |
| Mount snapshots | Yes (FUSE) | Yes (FUSE) |
| Daemon required | No | No |
About BorgBackup
Borg is not a single archive file but a deduplicating backup repository. It splits files into content-defined chunks and stores each unique chunk only once, so daily snapshots of large datasets cost almost nothing. AES-CTR encryption is built in.
Read the full BorgBackup guide →
About restic
restic is a modern deduplicating backup program written in Go. Like Borg it stores content-addressed chunks and supports encryption by default. Unlike Borg, restic targets a wide range of storage backends out of the box: local, SFTP, S3, Backblaze B2, Azure, GCS, Rclone, and more.
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