Assimilate — Front-End to Borg Backup

Assimilate your files to the Borg Collective

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:Author: Ken Kundert :Version: 0.1 :Released: 2026-01-11

Assimilate is a simple command line utility to orchestrate backups. It is designed to make common tasks simple and efficient. With Assimilate, you specify all the details about your backups once in advance, and then use a simple command line interface for your day-to-day activities.

Assimilate is a front-end to Borg_, a powerful and fast de-duplicating backup program. Use of Assimilate does not preclude the use of Borg directly on the same repository. The philosophy of Assimilate is to provide commands that you would use often and in an interactive manner with the expectation that you would use Borg directly for the remaining commands.

Assimilate is intended for use with Borg_ 2.0 or newer, which is currently not available in a stable release and is not recommended for general use. If you are using a earlier version of Borg you should consider using Emborg_.
Emborg is the immediate predecessor of Assimilate, but Assimilate is not backward compatible with Emborg.

Getting Help

You can find the documentation here: Assimilate_.

The help command provides information on how to use Assimlates's various features. To get a listing of the topics available, use::

assimilate help

Then, for information on a specific topic use::

assimilate help <topic>

It is worth browsing all of the available topics at least once to get a sense of all that Assimilate can do.

.. _borg: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io .. _emborg: https://emborg.readthedocs.io .. _assimilate: https://assimilate.readthedocs.io

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