"Resistance is futile" - bad association for backups

[TinajaLabs]

"Resistance is futile" --the borg

Not sure if you get it that the borg has a very negative connotation. It's a metaphor for societal conformance to the blind takeover of everything; like Amazon.com, Facebook, or Trump's denial of science, climate change, and the labeling of news organizations as "enemy of the people". It feels like I will be sharing my valuable assets with the collectively shared backups of all those who use "the borg" whether I like it or not.

Not a good association.

How about something less threatening like "Secure Dedupie"... ;)

I do appreciate your efforts.

Thanks, Chris.

[ThomasWaldmann]

not sure about blind takeover of everything. don't the borg choose and only assimilate the good stuff?

some points about "why 'borg'":

• deduplication (and also duplication, at restore time) is related to clones
• all your data will end up in (your) borg repo collective
• the borg (developer) collective will assimilate advanced technology if they see it fit
• you can make startrek jokes and print them in ridiculously big fluorescent green letters on black borgbackup t-shirts
• when i forked borgbackup from attic backup, it was due to the problem that attic was basically a one-developer project and advancing only very slowly. the idea was to have such a nice tool maintained by a bigger group of people (the borg collective) and speed up development.

some people upload their borg repos to the amazon cloud in trump country (not with borg, but otherwise) - so that's maybe getting close to what you posted, haha. but, it's still encrypted and authenticated, so not as bad as it sounds, assuming they can download it successfully when needed.

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2018/210/BorgBackup

some rsync users are still resisting, btw.

[ThomasWaldmann]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_(castle) you can alternatively associate with that kind of borg, if you prefer.

[danieldjewell]

FWIW, as a Star Trek fan myself, @ThomasWaldmann makes a great point - "The Borg" only assimilate things that will add to their own perfection -- as I recall, there were several canon instances where they refused to assimilate planets/races/species because they considered them "lesser" and would not add to their perfection.

That said, the word itself has quite a few meanings -- including "surety/guarantor/deposit" in Dutch. Not to mention that it's the name of places, and various other things - including a relatively common surname in Malta Wikipedia - Borg (disambiguation). Not to mention the Swedish Vodka brand. (If I recall my German correctly, I believe "die Burg" would be the cognate with "borg" in the various other Germanic languages like Danish, Swedish, etc. as @ThomasWaldmann pointed out. Perhaps renaming the project to "Burg" would work - sadly, that would remove so much of the fun!)

That said, IMHO, @TinajaLabs I think that while some may indeed associate the word "borg" with the alien race depicted in Star Trek, that would be their view and that would be their limitation on seeing the word in a limited way based on their cultural experiences. While I fully recognize that certain words do indeed have a negative meaning and carry with them a negative connotation, I also cannot help but think that if someone has such a strong rejection based on the meaning of the word (which in my view, seems to be used in a playful and fun way), perhaps they should choose to not use the free and open-source software as is their right in an open and free society.

In other words: optimally, everyone should take things in stride, laugh, and enjoy. I acknowledge that not everyone will do that and nothing I say can change that. But that would be the optimal situation.

There's an expression in German that encompasses what I'm trying to say -- it's not really "Gemütlichkeit" but perhaps "Du solltest lockerer werden". (Best idiomatic translation I can think of -- "Roll with it".)

I'd say - keep the name. It's cool. If people have a problem with it - well.... okay.

[fantasya-pbem]

Never judge something by its name. Borg or BorgBackup is a cool name.

[gagan0123]

I use it in conjunction with rsync on my Raspberry Pi. Rsync first syncs the data from servers to local drive, then borg is used for incremental backups. I do this because every time there's a need to restore a backup, rsync backups are the only ones that worked, after using a lot of other backup softwares.

One thing that brought me to this backup utility is the name "Borg" I like the borg collective and am a star trek fan.

~Just another resisting rsync user 😉

[ThomasWaldmann]

As there was the question in my inbox whether I'ld consider renaming the project:

No. :-)

I like the name due to the reasons stated above and everybody who does not like it (in the startrek sense) has non-startrek options, too, see above.

[ThomasWaldmann]

[ThomasWaldmann]

(that's made with nano banana)

[gagan0123]

Just to add, if you follow the series, the perception of Borg changed quite a lot in the Star Trek: Picard series. They went from being perceived as threats to being victims and ultimately heroic allies who sacrificed to save federation.