How to back up data privately and securely to the cloud using Borg and Vorta

[@valegory]

I really appreciate this idea of working through multiple levels of depth across a few videos. On one hand, it's super important to keep stuff relatively doable without too much tech experience because privacy should be for everyone, but on the other hand I personally find the more in depth stuff really interesting and learn a lot from it.

[@sunknudsen]

Thanks for sharing Vincent... I am about to finally publish the rest of the series after a ton of research. Things are about to get pretty technical. 🤓

[@timfd.w.4163]

Indeed this is awesome. Vorta and Borgbase did the job professionally as or even better than paid software. Finally I have found something free that s well done

[@NeonMinnen]

Great video. I use Borg/Borgbase + Vorta all the time. Manu, the owner of BB and creator of Vorta is a great guy as well! Cheers from Los Angeles.

[@sunknudsen]

Thanks for sharing and for the push. 🤓

[@SigmaLiving]

Definitely deserve more than 6k subscribers!

[@pabstube1]

I found your channel recently and i am loving the videos. Beautifully produce, excellent content and very well explained. Much appreciated!

[@sunknudsen]

Thanks for the push!

[@Leo-Crespi]

oh god, amazing channel. Thanks Sun!

[@sunknudsen]

Pleasure! Thanks for the push!

[@parttimeviking]

Of course we are sharing this. You are fantastic, keep it up! And please don't stop reminding anyone to not use sh*tty passwords. 😊 It is hilarious every time you say it - and very important.

[@sunknudsen]

Thanks for the push!

[@notionpicture]

Hey Sun, been following your videos for a while, great content for privacy and security. Keep it up bro!

[@sunknudsen]

Thanks for the push! Happy this content is helpful. 🤓

[@thorbag8695]

I'm sorry but that 'voooh!' is something i look for in every episode 😂

[@afonsosalbrecht]

i find it kinda annoying. It would be nice if he could do to cuts before posting the videos in order to keep his point much clearer and concise.

[@Ron-Ayres]

@@afonsosalbrecht You strike me as someone who perhaps values efficiency over humanity, with a low tolerance for human frailties. 🤔

[@alex-g7q1m]

wished I had found your channel earlier. You are amazing, Thank you!

[@sunknudsen]

Thanks for the push Alex.

[@starkxz]

Just discovered your channel. Really great content, it's hard to find professional content about privacy nowadays 👍

[@kostiantynkarzhanov9216]

Awesome, i love your videos! It is a whole new world for me but very very interesting! Thank you! 💛

[@gordonfreeman8796]

Hey dude, thank you for making this. I love your content it's very helpful to get started and get a preview of things.

[@galaxytrio]

Very helpful, Sun. Thanks.

[@AntonVanleeuw]

2:42, that's not how git works. Generally it stores all files as blobs, change one line in a file and a whole new blob is created. After a while git will do some optimisations (including deduplication) to decrease its database size, but still.

[@jeytis72]

Hi. Does VORTA GUI need to be always up and running for our scheduled backups to work regularly? Or will it run on background nonetheless? Thanks for your video.

[@pipoviola]

Amazing, man!

[@gabriellovate]

Cool content, happy to have discovered it (:

[@pixlplague]

Je suis vraiment impressionné par le contenu! T'as un des rares channels pour lequel j'ai un alerte automatique de nouveau vidéo.

[@sunknudsen]

Merci! Content de savoir que ces contenus sont utiles à d'autres.

[@marshallhyasi6213]

Great video

[@MattWittMusic]

Very helpful video! How well does Vorta + BorgBase work for backing up external hard drive data to the cloud? How does data retention work with Vorta and BorgBase? Would it be problematic if I run a backup with Vorta and my external hard drives are not connected to my computer?

[@sunknudsen]

Hey Matt, haven't tried running backups that reference unavailable files. I would recommend trying it out (and please share the result here). About data retention, if you don't enable pruning, the data should persist indefinitely until you reach your BorgBase quota (after which you would need to up your plan).

[@KrishnaRamalingam]

Hi Sun, thanks a lot for these videos. They are super helpful. Could you answer these two questions? 1. How do you restore if my hard disc fails? Where are the keys saved in the mentioned method 2. Is it possible to have a single repository but mirrored in two computers? Something like what can be done with GDrive. So one can switch through multiple computers

[@janommen]

note for vorta versions from 8.0: you have to restart vorta to be able to select new generated ssh keys in the dropdown menu.

[@mocanuciprian]

I would be curious to see how does this open source product compare to Arq Backup ( this also supports an ssh connection as destination ).

[@sunknudsen]

Great question... I actually used Arq 5 for years and recently switched to Borg. Borg is open source and (in my experience) much faster that Arq 5. Arq 6 showed promise but had many issues at launch (which are likely fixed by now). Also, github.com/arqbackup/arq_restore was never updated to support Arq 6 making the project even more proprietary.

[@mocanuciprian]

@@sunknudsen Thanks for the response. Keep up the great work .

[@sarundayo]

Just came across this video and it has helped me tremendously. If the file has been encrypted prior to upload, does Borg re-encrypts the file?

[@arnavodkaa]

Not really related to this video but how would you stack Safari (Newly updated in bug sur) with firefox now. I really love the integration Safari provides in ios and macOS. Thanks!

[@sunknudsen]

Great question... I favor Firefox because it is open source and more extensible, but Safari is OK from a privacy perspective (given one trusts Apple).

[@seloud]

Hi Sun. Thanks for this video (I just discovered your channel and it looks great!). This backup process with Borg seems really interesting and the happy path scenario works great. But it should be nice to show a worst case scenario for which we lost all data in our laptop (laptop broken, destroyed or stolen). What must be restored locally in the (new) laptop in order to restore and decrypt our files from the backup? I guess that if the private key is not stored in a safe place, our backups will be useless. Correct?

[@sunknudsen]

Yes, correct... using the steps in this guide, the key file is stored on your computer vs the server (which is more secure but less resilient to the scenario you mentioned). This is why the key should always be backed up in a safe remote place. I agree an episode on recovery would be nice. Keeping that in mind.

[@beefvalve]

great video once again, thanks sun. i so much love the idea of having something as convenient as icloud in the apple ecosystem, but being not only secure, but private also. by the way: will there be a future episode about how to build a pi hole? i know you don't like the idea of blocking ads, but a pi hole does also block tracking! (my two cents on ads: creators only get a little part of it, most of it goes to non-creators, and everybody knows websites that are so clustered with ads that you just close them immediately) can't wait to see the coming 3 episodes of the borg series. keep it up!

[@sunknudsen]

Thanks for the push and pleasure! I agree the trade-offs are hard, especially at first (thankfully, humans tends to forget quickly which means we can be happy at many different levels of convenience). I will look into Pi-hole. Thanks for sharing! I agree publicity can be (and tends to be) painful.

[@stavrosromanos3636]

Hi sun can you please advise what are the reasons that am getting the following error message: "Connection closed by remote host. is Borg working on the server?"

[@wololox1649]

Hi Sun, could you make a video on the best client to replace gmail?

[@sunknudsen]

Hey Flavio, yes! That episode in on my mind.

[@pabstube1]

Sun. can you please explain how to mount a repository from a different computer (in the case our laptop got stolen or the house catches on fire). i am not able to understand how to mount the image from a different machine. Thank so much!

[@ManiMani-ku5df]

Hey Sun - Your videos are really helpful. I have a question for you, how should we encrypt our external hard disks? What should be the approach?

[@MichaelSharpTechniSmart]

Awesome tutorial. I use Carbon Copy Cloner 5 for bootable external drive. What do you think of CCC's security?

[@sunknudsen]

I haven't tried CCC, but have used SuperDuper! in the past. One aspect that has recently turned me off is the fact it is no longer possible to clone Catalina to an encrypted volume. Does that work using CCC?

[@MichaelSharpTechniSmart]

@@sunknudsen Yes it does now. With Big adding Signed System Volume technology the external disk was not appear in the startup. Now I can boot to an encrypted external drive. You should do a video on it using their fully working trial version. Even better, talk to Mike Bombich.

[@pabstube1]

Sun, Thanks for this tutorial!!.super cool. For me It was impossible to make it work following the video. Fuse would not mount, Vorta kept giving me error messages. I tried installing older versions of fuse (running Mojave) but nothing worked.I was finally able to make it work installing everything from the command line using home-brew. Question: if my computer is stolen and i want to download my data in the repository, will i be able to do it just with the passphrase? Thanks

[@frndstp]

Sun, off topic question: tell us what you think about the new M1 chips. Will you continue to use macOS? I'm starting to learn programming, and I am concerned about privacy. I'm considering switching to Linux this days, but I don't know if I'm overreacting. Thanks!

[@sunknudsen]

Great question Fernando. I am worried and haven't upgraded my Mac since 2015. I actually purchased an additional MacBook Pro 2015 recently. That being said, the hardware has greatly improved since, but the privacy trade-offs are hard to stomach. It really depends on the use case. Using a M1 chip for video editing is fine. Using M1/Big Sur for our daily drivers... not so fine.

[@dpapa776]

Keep pushing your helping to set the future for privacy by design and on that note Happy Christmas 🎄🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌 out of 5 fruits 🍇 Pi hole 🕳 next always learning from a very modest you ! IPSec A must.. strange times

[@sunknudsen]

Thanks for the push Max!

[@YotamGuttman]

thanks for this video. I've been actually looking for something about Borgbase for a while. it's not a well covered topic unfortunately... but I'm looking at running it on an Ubuntu VPS rather than a computer with gui.. so bírta vorta isn't really an option 😅

[@pauldonahue7023]

Hey Sun. First off, you are amazing. I so appreciate your honesty and humility. I'm a tech wannabe and appreciate learning stuff from people like you. I stumbled onto you as I was setting up my new M1 Mac Mini, and while the stuff about the latest Russian cyber attacks was hitting the news. Wow, are you a god-send!!!!! Question, it seems that downloading Vorta may have messed up my Mac a bit. It's ok cause I ended up re-installing the OS. Was wondering about your thoughts and what you may think about the new M1 chip. I know you're busy so I'll patiently look forward to hearing from you. Hope you and your family are safe and well.

[@sunknudsen]

Hey Paul, thanks for the push and for caring about privacy. I haven't played with the new M1 Macs... once I do, I will make sure to share my experience on the privacy guides. I am a little worried about where Apple is heading... The hardware and OS does seem to be secure but privacy is another question.

[@Leo-Crespi]

extremely curious to find out if the new Safari is as much as safe as Firefox

[@sunknudsen]

The extension ecosystem is pretty limited on Safari... that being said, the browser itself is likely private and secure. I still favor Firefox!

[@Leo-Crespi]

@@sunknudsen cool thanks for letting me know your thoughts

[@Goldmaster]

What if you rename or internationally delete files? Can you backup without encryption?

[@RandomPate]

Borg+Rclone script with Google Drive sounds like the best option. Unlimited storage, encrypted, deduplicated cloud backups. Paid with prepaid VISA cards you get from store w/ cash. Plus the added privacy coming from the fact that everyone and their mom is storing stuff on Google, making sure your traffic doesn't stick out like a glowstick.

[@sunknudsen]

Thanks for sharing... Google still offers unlimited storage plans? I personally don't like using Google even if my data is encrypted, but that is probably overkill. Good point about not standing out... Opsec vs infosec. 🤓

[@thorbag8695]

Hey sun while I appreciate privacy, I want to know how I can check for, let's say a virus, or something that could've slipped across when I got lazy...are there any open source utilities/security and privacy oriented anti-malware softwares? I'm ready to use the terminal. (I visited a shady website BM to read manga sry)

[@thorbag8695]

@Adrian X Not o linux yet, any others

[@sunknudsen]

Hey, you can install ClamAV using Homebrew on macOS. See formulae.brew.sh/formula/clamav. That being said, I looked into open source antiviruses a while back and they tend to have a success rate of about 30%. Prevention is sill our best (and often only) bet. Another open source project that is worth mentioning is formulae.brew.sh/formula/chkrootkit (www.chkrootkit.org/). This project is used to check for rootkits.

[@thorbag8695]

@@sunknudsen thanks!!

[@thorbag8695]

@@sunknudsen Also a sad reality to see that there aren't enough open source security tools...but someone (This community) will step up

[@wza360]

Somehow can't connect to server when connecting to repo. restarted and Snitch showed connection it previously it didn't, but still not connecting. ~So seems Snitch is doing something, but if I disable network filter, it does not help. so trying to figure this out.

[@wza360]

I had to contact BorgBase support and they were super helpful. Problem was that my home folder had spaces (this happened when my restore failed and created a copy of my home folder instead of original name. So my $USER variable is also wrong in some cases. But I had to rename key to standard name and make it auto instead of custom key - then all worked.

[@thorbag8695]

what is the max storage for borg?

[@sunknudsen]

There is no technical limit... but depending on the backend, pricing is the limit.

[@vitalis]

What I do is to use Rclone mount a Borg/Vorta Repository on a cloud provider and then do the backups on it.

[@sunknudsen]

Thanks for sharing... you use Rclone to enable block storage in the context of Borg backups right?

[@vitalis]

@@sunknudsen yes, I auto-mount the Google Drive remotes when I start the mac. For my Vorta/Borg backup I do one to an external hdd and another to the local folder where rclone mounted Google Drive to. I'm testing this set-up bur it's working so far. I really enjoy all the knowledge you provide on this channel as I started to be much more conscious of privacy and security. One thing I also installed is Faronics Deep Freeze, where the system restores itself to the state I froze it to if I choose to re-boot instead of logging-off. I set-up this initially to keep a clean optimised version but it can be useful from a security standpoint.

[@MrSmilev]

@@vitalis thanks just tried it. works amazingly well. Just required me to add --vfs-cache-mode writes to rclone mount command so that vorta could create a repo in local mount path.

[@thestreamreader]

Do you still use this method?

[@aicat253]

how secure and private is airdrop?

[@sunknudsen]

Great question... unfortunately I haven't explored the subject. That being said, an open source alternative that I really like (to move files between computers, not smartphones) is Magic-Wormhole.

[@EmadMatty0]

a New subscriber I like your content and hopefully, you make a video about VPN, keep going

[@sunknudsen]

Hey, have a look at kzbin.info. I published a few episodes on the subject.

[@oscard4666]

now the interface of the app is different, there is not the menu "ssh key" directly available

[@oscard4666]

so I just generated the ssh key with the terminal instead and it worked then

[@JensUhlmannOfficial]

Hi Sun, first of all I really enjoy your videos and gained a lot of value though them. I would love to hear your opinion about the new M1 Macs (and for that matter about Apple in general) regarding privacy and security and how you think Apple's complete control over every device will change what they can do with our data. I am very tempted to change to a MacBook in one or two years but the complete control scares me a little bit. In theory, the complete control should allow them to reach a really, really strong device security, but I don't know what I should really think about Apple's privacy claims, my guess is that the NSA can in the end spy on any device in the end anyways, but third party companies are locked out with Apple's devices...

[@sunknudsen]

Hey Jens, I share that dilemma. I would also love to upgrade to a new M1 MacBook Pro but I am resisting the urge. In a nutshell, privacy (and freedom) vs security... Take authoritarian governments for example... if one behaves, they are likely safer. My gut feeling is the same logic is increasingly applying to the Apple ecosystem. We are "controlled" under the promise of security.

[@JensUhlmannOfficial]

Thanks for your reply. So do you plan to switch from MacOS? Or are you going to upgrade to the last possible intel Mac?

[@raul230285]

rsnapshot use please

[@vihuvac]

Has someone got this error trying to mount the Backup up on macOS Catalina? ERROR: borg mount not available: loading FUSE support failed [ImportError: No module named 'Ilfuse']...I tried installing it via pip but it didn't work.

[@sunknudsen]

Hey, are you installing Borg using "brew install borgbackup" (if so, see github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/5522 and github.com/Homebrew/discussions/discussions/186, the recipe has changed and things are broken)? If you installed Borg using pip, installing "llfuse" might help (see pypi.org/project/llfuse/).

[@vihuvac]

@@sunknudsen there's no way to make it work! The homebrew even install python3.9. The binaries does not work with the native version of python3 on macOS. It looks like llfuse is deprecated, they suggest using pyfuse3 but it does not work. I reported a bug as well, I hope we can find a solution asap. Thanks a lot for you support.

[@saumya942]

Is it just me or the UX for this is easier to understand than iCloud?

[@Drakcloud65]

Hey, just an idea, maybe you should split videos in 2. One video explaining a software etc. And one video with straightforward installing. Then maybe put a link in the description. That will shorten the video and will be easier to follow

[@sunknudsen]

Thanks for the feedback. Does the "TL;DR" in the description help?

[@Drakcloud65]

It does indeed, didn't ses it 😄

[@matousbecvar9925]

Thats Sylar from Heroes

[@Chris-zd4jx]

Nice, thank you!! But sadly not working for me (using macOS 11.0.1, macFUSE 4.0.4): vorta.borg.borg_thread - ERROR - borg mount not available: loading FUSE support failed [ImportError: dlopen(/Applications/Vorta.app/Contents/Resources/borg-dir/llfuse.cpython-37m-darwin.so, 2): Library not loaded: @loader_path/libosxfuse.2.dylib Referenced from: /Applications/Vorta.app/Contents/Resources/borg-dir/llfuse.cpython-37m-darwin.so Reason: no suitable image found. Did find: file system relative paths not allowed in hardened programs] Any thoughts/ideas on this? All of my "research" results only resembled my problem, but were not 100% identical. Thanks!

[@sunknudsen]

Hey Chris, can you please try installing github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/releases/tag/osxfuse-3.11.2 instead?

[@Chris-zd4jx]

@@sunknudsen thanks for your lightning fast answer! I already tried that before, identical error message... :-(

[@sunknudsen]

Btw, I haven't upgraded to Big Sur so I might be missing something. If the issue persists, can you please open an issue on Vorta's GitHub repo? Actually, I believe a similar issue exists. github.com/borgbase/vorta/issues/733

[@Chris-zd4jx]

@@sunknudsen yap, that's pretty much the same issue; I was hoping that you might have stumbled across the same problem in the past... - aigain 5 star rating for your support!

[@sunknudsen]

Manu (Vorta's lead dev and founder of BorgBase) is aware of the issue (we have collaborated on putting together a Homebrew tap available at github.com/borgbackup/homebrew-tap). I'm sure he's working on a fix.

[@Jinxyoutoheaven]

Use 1.5 or 2x playback if he’s going too slow.

[@thorbag8695]

I haven't seen any performance lag, and the site was encrypted but it seemed pretty shady to me with so many redirects I'm sure we've all been there at least once

[@sunknudsen]

Which site are you referring to?

[@thorbag8695]

i don't remember anymore

[@MrBlaq]

LOL@naming these apps after Star Trek villians

[@its_herocast276]

Why would anyone ever do this, if they can just simply encrypt their files with AES 256, save them on a drive, and upload a backup of all of them to Google Drive, in order to have a secure online and offline backup? All files are 100% fully encrypted, how would Google or any company ever unlock files encrypted with AES 256, that used a 128 character password including lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and symbols? I believe this is by far the ultimate method to securing your data (files), or am I wrong? If I am, can someone please explain, thank you.

[@sunknudsen]

> Why would anyone ever do this, if they can just simply encrypt their files with AES 256, save them on a drive, and upload a backup of all of them to Google Drive, in order to have a secure online and offline backup? Great question... I do this for smaller backups that I save to a USB flash drive. Answer: using deduplication is amazing to save disk space and uploading incremental backups to the cloud is (by an order of magnitude) more efficient from a bandwidth perspective. My Borg backups run every hour and take only a few seconds to run.

[@user-hk9ux5sn6k]

1st

[@ExtraSweetSour]

2nd

[@EverSpaceTime]

Why the hell is everyone compressing things instead of making par sets of things? A good backup should be a bit larger, not smaller.

[@QuikRay]

I want my stuff in my possession....not someone elses...I don't care how good it is. If you don't have it you don't own it...and the whole cloud thing is very stupid idea.

[@haroldbridges515]

Gotta do something about those hands. Very distracting.