Accessories

Borg-Space

Borg-Space is a utility that tracks and reports the space required by your Borg repositories. It also allows you to graph the space used over time.

The following is an example of a graph generated by borg-space that allowed me to catch a problem that resulted in excessive growth in in the space required to hold my repository: in the switch from Borg 1.1 to Borg 1.2, I had neglected to implement a compaction strategy. The problem was resolved on April 5th.

Logging with ntLog

ntLog is a log file aggregation utility.

When run Emborg writes over a previously generated logfile. This becomes problematic if you have one cron script that runs create frequently and another that runs a command like prune less frequently. If there is trouble with the prune command it will be difficult to see and resolve because its logfile will be overwritten by subsequent create commands.

ntlog can be run after each Emborg run to aggregate the individual logfile from each run into a single accumulating log file. To arrange this you can use run_after_borg:

run_after_borg = 'ntlog --keep-for 7d ~/.local/share/emborg/{config_name}.log'

This accumulates the log files as they are created to ~/.local/share/emborg/{config_name}.log.nt.

If your text editor is configured to use fold markers, you can configure ntlog to add headers to the composite logfile that contain fold markers. In doing so you can collapse large log entries into a single line folds until they are needed, at which point you can easily open the fold and examine the contents of the log file. Here is an example that adds headers with Vim fold markers to the composite log file:

run_after_borg = [
    [
        'ntlog',
        '--keep-for', '1w',
        '--day', 'D MMMM YYYY  {{{{{{1',
        '--entry', 'h:mm A  {{{{{{2',
        '--description', '{cmd_name}',
        '--fold-marker', '{{{{{{ ❬❬❬',
        '--editor', 'vim',
        '{log_dir}/{config_name}.log',
    ],
]

If you use Vim, you can figure it to fold the composite log file with :set foldmethod=marker. You can then open a fold using zo and close it with zc.