borg repo-space

borg [common options] repo-space [options]

options
	--reserve SPACE	Amount of space to reserve (e.g. 100M, 1G). Default: 0.
	--free	Free all reserved space. Do not forget to reserve space again later.
Common options

Description

This command manages reserved space in a repository.

Borg cannot work in disk-full conditions (it cannot lock a repository and thus cannot run prune/delete or compact operations to free disk space).

To avoid running into such dead-end situations, you can put some objects into a repository that take up disk space. If you ever run into a disk-full situation, you can free that space, and then Borg will be able to run normally so you can free more disk space by using borg prune/borg delete/borg compact. After that, do not forget to reserve space again, in case you run into that situation again later.

Examples:

# Create a new repository:
$ borg repo-create ...
# Reserve approx. 1 GiB of space for emergencies:
$ borg repo-space --reserve 1G

# Check the amount of reserved space in the repository:
$ borg repo-space

# EMERGENCY! Free all reserved space to get things back to normal:
$ borg repo-space --free
$ borg prune ...
$ borg delete ...
$ borg compact -v  # only this actually frees space of deleted archives
$ borg repo-space --reserve 1G  # reserve space again for next time

Reserved space is always rounded up to full reservation blocks of 64 MiB.