A native macOS client for Borg backup repositories. SwiftUI, menu bar app, Touch ID, launchd scheduling, and first-class panels for BorgBase and self-hosted BorgBox servers.

BorgMac does not reimplement the Borg protocol. It drives the borg command line tool as a subprocess, so anything Borg can do with a repository, BorgMac can too, and your repositories stay fully usable from the terminal or any other client.

brew install --cask prietus/tap/borgmac

This installs BorgMac.app into /Applications. Upgrade with brew upgrade --cask borgmac.

Download BorgMac-<version>.zip from the Releases page, unzip, and drag BorgMac.app to /Applications. Builds are signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple.

Either way you also need the borg binary, which BorgMac looks for in /opt/homebrew/bin and /usr/local/bin. The cask does not install it for you because the two Homebrew formulae that provide it conflict with each other, so pick one:

brew install borgbackup         # standard
brew install borgbackup-fuse    # same, plus FUSE support for mounting archives

• macOS 14 Sonoma or newer (Apple silicon and Intel).
• Borg 1.x on the Mac.

Repositories

• Local, SSH, BorgBase and BorgBox repositories side by side in one sidebar.
• Wizards to create a new repository on BorgBase (EU or US), on a BorgBox server, or on local disk / any SSH host, with a choice of encryption mode.
• Passphrases live in the macOS Keychain and are unlocked with Touch ID. Scheduled backups use a non-interactive path so they never block on a prompt.
• Pick an existing SSH key or generate a dedicated ed25519 key per repository.

Backups and archives

• Manual backups with exclude patterns, progress, and cancellation.
• Any number of schedules per repository, installed as launchd agents. Retries with backoff, native notifications on success or failure, and a "Run now" button.
• Archive browser with full-tree search, Quick Look previews, and restore of single files or whole folders.
• File history: see every version of a path across all archives.
• Treemap of what takes up space inside an archive.
• Prune, check, compact, delete, break-lock, and passphrase change from the UI.

Menu bar and widget

• Runs as a menu bar app. The menu shows every schedule with its last result and next run, and lets you start a backup or open the main window.
• A WidgetKit overview widget for the desktop and Notification Center.

BorgBase panel

• All your BorgBase repositories with quota bars, region, encryption, last activity and stale flags.
• Create, rename, edit (quota, inactivity alerts, access control, scheduled compaction) and delete repositories. Manage SSH keys. Import any repository into BorgMac in one click.

BorgBox panel

• Connect to a self-hosted BorgBox daemon: server stats, active sessions, repositories.
• Check, prune, compact and break-lock as server-side jobs with live logs. Browse remote archives. Toggle append-only mode. Configure stale-backup webhook alerts and test them.
• Register a new repository (BorgMac generates the key, registers it with the daemon and adopts the repo) or import an existing one.
• Automation panel: create and manage server-side maintenance schedules (periodic check and compact) across all your BorgBox servers.

• Every operation is a borg subprocess run with --log-json. Borg's JSON log lines are parsed into readable messages for the UI.
• The passphrase is passed through BORG_PASSPHRASE in the child's environment. It is never written to disk or to the command line.
• For SSH repositories with a chosen key, BorgMac sets BORG_RSH to ssh -i <key> -o IdentitiesOnly=yes.
• Scheduled backups are launchd agents at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.carlos.BorgMac.backup.<repo>.<schedule>.plist. Each one runs the app binary headless with --run-backup <repo> <schedule>, which performs the backup and exits without showing any UI.
• The app is not sandboxed, because it has to run borg and ssh and read whatever you back up. The widget extension is sandboxed.

Files on disk:

Passphrases, API tokens and BorgBox credentials are in the Keychain, not in any of these files.

The launchd plists embed the absolute path of the app. If you move BorgMac.app after creating schedules, toggle each schedule off and on again so the plist is rewritten. A Homebrew install always lives in /Applications, so this does not come up.

The Xcode project is generated from project.yml with XcodeGen and is not committed.

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -project BorgMac.xcodeproj -scheme BorgMac -configuration Debug build \
  CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY="-" CODE_SIGNING_REQUIRED=NO

Or open BorgMac.xcodeproj in Xcode after generating it. The app ends up in Xcode's DerivedData folder; add -derivedDataPath build to keep it inside the repository (build/ is gitignored).

Layout:

• BorgMac/Models — repository, archive, tree and cache models.
• BorgMac/Services — BorgClient (the borg wrapper), Keychain, launchd scheduling, the headless backup runner, and the BorgBase and BorgBox API clients.
• BorgMac/Views — SwiftUI views, one file per sheet or panel.
• BorgMacWidget — the WidgetKit extension. Shared/ holds the snapshot model both targets read.

./release.sh <version> builds a Release configuration, signs it with the Developer ID, notarizes and staples it, then tags v<version>, creates the GitHub release with the zip attached, and bumps version and sha256 in the cask at prietus/homebrew-tap. NOTARIZE=0 and PUBLISH=0 give you a local-only build.

MIT.