Ability to see list of backups even when borg repo is locked

[FelixSchwarz]

When a borg backup runs, I can not use borg list ... which is a bit annoying with long-runing backups. I'd prefer if borg could show me the list even while a backup is running. It would be totally fine to just show backups which were started from the same machine.

Currently I have to use a custom script which exports the data after each backup which is a bit annoying.

[ThomasWaldmann]

borg2 will use much less locking.

For what do you use the list of archives?

[FelixSchwarz]

For what do you use the list of archives?

A trivial use case is a health check/monitoring ("was there a backup within the last X hours?"). Sometimes I can not do anything on the backup storage server and most of my backups are encrypted.

Another case is that some systems have really long running backups (up to 2h), and these backups are run 4-6 times per day so there is a good chance that a backup is currently running. So there is a good chance of a running backup when I ssh into the server to quickly see how long the last backup took and how big it is.