borg import-tar example usage?

[DizkoDan]

Another simple question. I have a server which I do not have shell access to, but I create tar.gz backup from it's control panel. and have sftp access to grab them I'd like to pull these down with rclone of something, then process them with borg to get incremental compressed/deduped backups. I found the borg import-tar command, but there don't seem to be any examples of it's usage, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to script my scenario. Basically, I pull down multiple tar.gz files. They each have the same directory structure, so I can't just dump them all in the same place because they'll intermingle in the same directories, and that would be undesirable.

Can you provide any example usage for this? I'm not really sure how to handle this on the borg side if I did say a for loop on each tarball.

Thanks in advance,
-Dan

[ThomasWaldmann]

https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/tar.html there's the docs, but you are right, no example for import-tar (yet).

borg import-tar REPO::ARCHIVE mytar.tar.gz

If you have multiple tar files, you'll need to come up with different archive names (must be unique) and a loop to iterate over them, doing one import-tar per tar archive.

[DizkoDan]

I tested this method, and it worked great for the initial creation. However, when attempting to run it again against an updated tarball, it just hangs with no output. If I ctrl+c it, I get the following error.

Error: filter gzip -d failed, rc=-2

borg 1.2.0

Running command borg import-tar --compression zstd -s -p /path/to/borgrepo::archive1 tarball1.tar.gz

#6401 seems to be the same problem.

[ThomasWaldmann]

did you choose a different borg archive name when runing it again? you can't have the same one twice.

[DizkoDan]

Well that makes sense. Totally overlooked that, and that explains what I was going to need to do for pruning. Thanks for making such an awesome product! I'm really enjoying using/learning about it. Wish I could use it for full desktop/laptop backups, but the disk access issue makes it a total PITA on macos, even with vorta.

[ThomasWaldmann]

Closing this as outdated: it has seen no activity for a long time and predates the current borg releases.

If this still affects you on a current version - borg 1.4.x (stable) or the borg 2.0.0 beta - please open a new discussion with up-to-date details.