Borg activity

Let’s say you’ve chosen borg-backup to keep backups of all of your systems. Since you want to keep your data safe from prying eyes, you’ve set passwords on all your backups.

A borg standing in a recharge station
A borg backup (source Wikipedia)

You want to ensure your systems are actually backing up on schedule. With borg, you run the borg info command. But that needs a password, and you probably haven’t memorized the command syntax! Is there a faster way to check?

The faster way to check

After Borg completes a backup, it updates the index file in the Borg repository. That means you can check the modification time on the index files. For example: ls -l borg/*/index*

Here’s a fancier example, with shell trickery and memorable server names:

# ls -lrt borg/*/index* | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f6-
Mar 14 10:53 borg/ravioli/index.3393
Mar 14 11:06 borg/neon/index.1356
Apr 22 22:47 borg/mentor/index.910
Apr 24 08:32 borg/castle/index.4640
Apr 24 10:01 borg/liquid/index.12801
Apr 24 10:02 borg/jumbo/index.6759
Apr 24 10:03 borg/apropos/index.12629
Apr 24 10:45 borg/legend/index.12115

Looks like I had better check on the ravioli and neon backups!