Using Borg on TrueNAS

I installed TrueNAS a couple months ago to try out ZFS. It has some simple backup options built-in but I didn’t see any encrypted options. Since I use Borg elsewhere I thought this was a good opportunity to figure out how to put it on TrueNAS. TrueNAS is based on Debian, but relying on direct package installations isn’t recommended so I needed another option.

I was going to use TrueCharts’ borg chart but TrueNAS SCALE is phasing out support for charts completely so I opted to install a binary manually and see if a standard approach appears later. It turned out to be pretty straight forward, steps below:

1. Download a borg binary. You’ll want to use a version of the unfortunately-named borg-linuxnewer64 builds which are built for Debian 12. I used the latest stable version, 1.2.8.
2. Copy the binary somewhere. I put it in /mnt/bin/.
3. Try to run /mnt/bin/borg -V. If you get an error saying /mnt/bin/borg: error while loading shared libraries: libz.so.1: failed to map segment from shared object you need to add a temp directory it can write to. I made /mnt/tmp and then ran export TMPDIR="/mnt/tmp".

Now /mnt/bin/borg -V should work and you can add it to whatever scripts you use to backup your system. Don’t forget to set the TMPDIR in your scripts too.

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