Borg Backup: 10 years already since 1.0.0!

[ThomasWaldmann]

Celebrating a Decade of Deduplicating Backups

March 5, 2026

Exactly ten years ago today — on March 5, 2016 — we released BorgBackup 1.0.0.

What started as a bold fork of Attic Backup with a vision for a more robust, more featureful, and community-driven backup tool has grown into one of the most trusted free and open-source backup solutions in the world.

Today, we're celebrating this milestone and looking back at what the community has accomplished together.

A Decade in Numbers

The numbers speak for themselves (since 1.0.0 release up to today):

• 13,000+ GitHub stars (if you like borg, please give it a star!)
• 11,099 git commits
• 341 contributors
• 3,801 issues closed on GitHub (note: many GitHub issues are not bugs - we use issues also for support, ideas and feature requests, TODOs, etc.)
• 3,968 pull requests merged
• 47 stable releases

These aren't just numbers — they represent countless hours of work by a passionate community of developers, testers, documentation writers, and users who care deeply about keeping data safe — and about free and open source software.

From 1.0 to 2.0 and Beyond

When Borg 1.0.0 shipped in 2016, it already offered powerful deduplicating, compressed, and encrypted backups. Over the past decade, the project has evolved enormously, improving performance, efficiency, security and reliability.

While Borg 1.x is used for production backups, development of Borg 2 has been ongoing in parallel for quite a while, resulting in 20 beta releases.

There will be breaking changes in Borg 2 (for good reasons) and, to minimize upgrade effort in the future, we try to put all breaking changes in before Borg 2.0.0 gets finally released.

Thank You

Borg exists because of its community. Whether you've contributed code, reported a bug, written documentation, helped support someone, packaged Borg for your distribution, donated to the project financially, or simply trusted Borg with your precious data — thank you.

Thomas Waldmann (maintainer / lead developer)

[FelixSchwarz]

Thank you, Thomas for the enormous efforts you put into borg. I started to use borg since ~2015 and and since then I've never lost data - as long as borg managed to create at least one backup. I love the deduplication features but also your dedication to maintaining older versions of borg.

I try to give back by maintaining borg packages for Fedora + EPEL and occasionally contributing patches for new library versions and I hope to use borg for the decades to come!

[devZer0]

i'd also like to say thank you! it's a brilliant tool !