borg-benchmark-crud(1)

💅 borg-benchmark-crud

okay bestie, so this is a page from the borg backup tool manuals, and it's literally about flexing on your hardware. it's called borg-benchmark-crud, and it's the "how fast is my computer actually doing stuff" vibe check for your repos. let's get into it 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

borg [common options] benchmark crud [options] PATH

that's it. that's the whole entry. borg, some common options, benchmark crud, some options again, and a PATH. slay. 💖

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so what does this do?? this command benchmarks borg CRUD operations — that's Create, Read, Update, Delete, the four horsemen of literally any data thing ever. 🔥

it creates input data down below the PATH you give it, and backs that data up into the repository you point at with -r/--repo (or, if you're feeling fancy and don't wanna type it, the BORG_REPO environment variable). the repo has to already exist — no, it will not make one for you. it can be a fresh empty repo or an existing one, doesn't matter, because the command is gonna create / read / update / delete some archives named borg-benchmark-crud* in there. that's the whole bit. 💫

make sure you have free space there!! you will need about 1 GB each (+ overhead). not me being dramatic, that's just what the man page says. 🫠

if your repo is encrypted and borg needs a passphrase to unlock the key, do this:

BORG_PASSPHRASE=mysecret borg -r REPO benchmark crud PATH

measurements are done with different input file sizes and counts, so it's giving variety. but — and this is the important tea — the file contents are very artificial (either all zero or all random), so the results do not necessarily reflect performance with real data. also, because of the kind of content used, no compression is used in these benchmarks. periodt. 😌

now let's break down what each little test actually is, because the naming is lowkey cryptic:

• C- == borg create (1st archive creation, no compression, do not use files cache)
  • C-Z- == all-zero files. full dedup, so this is primarily measuring reader/chunker/hasher. 📖
  • C-R- == random files. no dedup, measuring throughput through all processing stages. 🚀
• R- == borg extract (extract archive, dry-run, do everything, but do not write files to disk)
  • R-Z- == all zero files. measuring heavily duplicated files.
  • R-R- == random files. no duplication here, measuring throughput through all processing stages, except writing to disk. 💾
• U- == borg create (2nd archive creation of unchanged input files, measure files cache speed)
  • the throughput value is kind of virtual here, it does not actually read the file. iconic behaviour honestly.
  • U-Z- == needs to check the 2 all-zero chunks' existence in the repo.
  • U-R- == needs to check existence of a lot of different chunks in the repo. 😭
• D- == borg delete archive (soft-delete the last remaining archive, measure deletion)
  • deletion only removes the archive from the archives list, it does not free any repository space — that is what borg compact does (and that's not measured here, so don't come for it).
  • D-Z- == all-zero files archive.
  • D-R- == random files archive.

please note that there might be quite some variance in these measurements. try multiple measurements and having an otherwise idle machine (and network, if you use it). your wifi doing its little dance mid-benchmark WILL show up in the numbers, no cap. 🙈

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

see borg-common(1) for common options of Borg commands. that's where all the shared stuff lives, iykyk. 💜

🌸 arguments 🌸

• PATH — the path where you wanna create the benchmark input data. that's it, that's the girl. 🎀

💅 options 💅

• --json-lines — format output as JSON Lines. for the girlies who want their numbers machine-readable. ✨

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• borg-common(1)

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⭐ Author ⭐

The Borg Collective 🫶

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and that's the whole page bestie!! this was borg-benchmark-crud(1) from the borg backup tool, dated 2026-10-07. go benchmark something and have the day you deserve 💖🦋✨