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| title |
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| How to extract a backup |
Extract
When the worst happens—or you want to test your backups—the first step is
to figure out which archive to extract. A good way to do that is to use the
list action:
borgmatic list
(No borgmatic list action? Try the old-style --list, or upgrade
borgmatic!)
That should yield output looking something like:
host-2019-01-01T04:05:06.070809 Tue, 2019-01-01 04:05:06 [...]
host-2019-01-02T04:06:07.080910 Wed, 2019-01-02 04:06:07 [...]
Assuming that you want to extract the archive with the most up-to-date files and therefore the latest timestamp, run a command like:
borgmatic extract --archive host-2019-01-02T04:06:07.080910
(No borgmatic extract action? Try the old-style --extract, or upgrade
borgmatic!)
With newer versions of borgmatic, you can simplify this to:
borgmatic extract --archive latest
The --archive value is the name of the archive to extract. This extracts the
entire contents of the archive to the current directory, so make sure you're
in the right place before running the command.
Repository selection
If you have a single repository in your borgmatic configuration file(s), no
problem: the extract action figures out which repository to use.
But if you have multiple repositories configured, then you'll need to specify the repository path containing the archive to extract. Here's an example:
borgmatic extract --repository repo.borg --archive host-2019-...
Extract particular files
Sometimes, you want to extract a single deleted file, rather than extracting
everything from an archive. To do that, tack on one or more --path values.
For instance:
borgmatic extract --archive host-2019-... --path path/1 path/2
Note that the specified restore paths should not have a leading slash. Like a
whole-archive extract, this also extracts into the current directory. So for
example, if you happen to be in the directory /var and you run the extract
command above, borgmatic will extract /var/path/1 and /var/path/2.
Extract to a particular destination
By default, borgmatic extracts files into the current directory. To instead
extract files to a particular destination directory, use the --destination
flag:
borgmatic extract --archive host-2019-... --destination /tmp
When using the --destination flag, be careful not to overwrite your system's
files with extracted files unless that is your intent.
Database restoration
The borgmatic extract command only extracts files. To restore a database,
please see the documentation on database backups and
restores.
borgmatic does not perform database restoration as part of borgmatic extract
so that you can extract files from your archive without impacting your live
databases.
Mount a filesystem
If instead of extracting files, you'd like to explore the files from an
archive as a FUSE
filesystem, you can use the borgmatic mount action. Here's an example:
borgmatic mount --archive host-2019-... --mount-point /mnt
This mounts the entire archive on the given mount point /mnt, so that you
can look in there for your files.
Omit the --archive flag to mount all archives (lazy-loaded):
borgmatic mount --mount-point /mnt
Or use the "latest" value for the archive to mount the latest successful archive:
borgmatic mount --archive latest --mount-point /mnt
If you'd like to restrict the mounted filesystem to only particular paths from
your archive, use the --path flag, similar to the extract action above.
For instance:
borgmatic mount --archive host-2019-... --mount-point /mnt --path var/lib
When you're all done exploring your files, unmount your mount point. No
--archive flag is needed:
borgmatic umount --mount-point /mnt