borgmatic/docs/how-to/inspect-your-backups.md at 9c75063c05861c34280dca996c9df2ab70b86406

Dan Helfman 90595e9c18 Only log to syslog when run from a non-interactive console (e.g. a cron job). Related to #197 .

2019-06-27 14:41:21 -07:00

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How to inspect your backups

Backup progress

By default, borgmatic runs proceed silently except in the case of errors. But if you'd like to to get additional information about the progress of the backup as it proceeds, use the verbosity option:

borgmatic --verbosity 1

This lists the files that borgmatic is archiving, which are those that are new or changed since the last backup.

Or, for even more progress and debug spew:

borgmatic --verbosity 2

Existing backups

Borgmatic provides convenient flags for Borg's list and info functionality:

borgmatic list
borgmatic info

(No borgmatic list or info actions? Try the old-style --list or --info. Or upgrade borgmatic!)

Logging

By default, borgmatic logs to a local syslog-compatible daemon if one is present and borgmatic is running in a non-interactive console. Where those logs show up depends on your particular system. If you're using systemd, try running journalctl -xe. Otherwise, try viewing /var/log/syslog or similiar.

You can customize the log level used for syslog logging with the --syslog-verbosity flag, and this is independent from the console logging --verbosity flag described above. For instance, to get additional information about the progress of the backup as it proceeds:

borgmatic --syslog-verbosity 1

Or to increase syslog logging to include debug spew:

borgmatic --syslog-verbosity 2

systemd journal

If your local syslog daemon is systemd's journal, be aware that journald by default throttles the rate at which a particular program can log. So you may need to change the journald rate limit in /etc/systemd/journald.conf if you're finding that borgmatic journald logs are missing.

Note that the sample borgmatic systemd service file already has this rate limit disabled.

Scripting borgmatic

To consume the output of borgmatic in other software, you can include an optional --json flag with create, list, or info to get the output formatted as JSON.

Note that when you specify the --json flag, Borg's other non-JSON output is suppressed so as not to interfere with the captured JSON. Also note that JSON output only shows up at the console, and not in syslog.

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