borgmatic/docs/how-to/restore-a-backup.md
2019-06-01 13:23:48 -07:00

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How to restore a backup

Extract

When the worst happens—or you want to test your backups—the first step is to figure out which archive to restore. A good way to do that is to use the --list action:

borgmatic --list

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 restore 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

The --archive value is the name of the archive to restore. 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-...

Restore particular files

Sometimes, you want to restore a single deleted file, rather than restoring everything from an archive. To do that, tack on one or more --restore-path values. For instance:

borgmatic --extract --archive host-2019-... --restore-path /path/1 /path/2

Like a whole-archive restore, this also restores into the current directory.