Windows

Backups with Vorta

Vorta is a frontend for borg backup. Also take a look at the officical instructions to install Vorta for Windows.

Windows is not yet officially supported by Borg Backup. However, you can make it work with WSL on Windows.

Necessary steps

  • install VcXsrv (X server for Windows) and run it. You can save the configuration to a file and move it to the autostart folder (find it with Win+r: shell:startup).
  • activate WSL in Windows features
  • install Ubuntu
  • install vorta: sudo apt install vorta
  • fix errors
  • ImportError: libQt5Core.so.5 : cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory: run the following
sudo strip --remove-section=.note.ABI-tag /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Core.so.5
  • export environment variables and run vorta
export DISPLAY=:0
export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1
export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=de_DE
vorta

Create a Windows shortcut:

  • Right click and "new shortcut"
  • Put the following in the "Target" field:
C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe --distribution Ubuntu bash -c "export DISPLAY=:0 && export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 && export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 && export LANGUAGE=de_DE && vorta"
  • optionally, check the box to start the program minimized. This will start the cmd window minimized while vorta itself will come up normally.

All drives should be mounted in WSL at /mnt/{c,d,...}.

Create a bigger ESP partition (default 100MB)

Source

  1. Boot Windows installer
  2. Press Shift+F10 to open command line
  3. Type diskpart
  4. Type list disk. All disks will be printed. Note the number of your disk (most likely 0. Select it with select disk 0
  5. Create ESP: create partition efi size=512 (512MiB)
  6. Exit diskpart: exit
  7. Continue installation

Telemetry

Switch off the following services.

WerSvc — Windows-Fehlerberichterstattungsdienst
DiagTrack — Benutzererfahrungen und Telemetrie im verbundenen Modus

Boot directly into BIOS

shutdown /r /fw /f /t 0

Retrive Windows key from firmware table

The bottom couple of rows produced by the following command are your key.

hexdump -C /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM