DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / borgbackup2 / borg2-diff.1.en
BORG-DIFF(1) borg backup tool BORG-DIFF(1)

borg-diff - Diff contents of two archives

borg [common options] diff [options] ARCHIVE1 ARCHIVE2 [PATH...]

This command finds differences (file contents, user/group/mode) between archives.

A repository location and an archive name must be specified for REPO::ARCHIVE1. ARCHIVE2 is just another archive name in same repository (no repository location allowed).

For archives created with Borg 1.1 or newer diff automatically detects whether the archives are created with the same chunker params. If so, only chunk IDs are compared, which is very fast.

For archives prior to Borg 1.1 chunk contents are compared by default. If you did not create the archives with different chunker params, pass --same-chunker-params. Note that the chunker params changed from Borg 0.xx to 1.0.

For more help on include/exclude patterns, see the borg_patterns command output.

See borg-common(1) for common options of Borg commands.

ARCHIVE1 name
ARCHIVE2 name
paths of items inside the archives to compare; patterns are supported

only consider numeric user and group identifiers
Override check of chunker parameters.
Sort the output lines by file path.
Format output as JSON Lines.

exclude paths matching PATTERN
read exclude patterns from EXCLUDEFILE, one per line
include/exclude paths matching PATTERN
read include/exclude patterns from PATTERNFILE, one per line

$ borg diff archive1 archive2


    +17 B      -5 B [-rw-r--r-- -> -rwxr-xr-x] file1


   +135 B    -252 B file2
added           0 B file4
removed         0 B file3
$ borg diff archive1 archive2
{"path": "file1", "changes": [{"type": "modified", "added": 17, "removed": 5}, {"type": "mode", "old_mode": "-rw-r--r--", "new_mode": "-rwxr-xr-x"}]}
{"path": "file2", "changes": [{"type": "modified", "added": 135, "removed": 252}]}
{"path": "file4", "changes": [{"type": "added", "size": 0}]}
{"path": "file3", "changes": [{"type": "removed", "size": 0}]}


borg-common(1)

The Borg Collective

2023-03-01