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Consider that backups have been made to a remote repository, located on /mnt/backup on server.

For non-Borg users, a repository consists of multiple archives. A single archive is created every time a backup is made. Now, suppose I want to extract a specific archive - for simplicity, the most recent one.

The way I'm currently doing this is to get a list of archives from the remote repository, and then store their names in a mailarchives array. That looks like:

mapfile -t mailarchives < <(borg list --short 'faheem@server:/mnt/backup') 

Then I extract all the files from mailarchive[-1] (the most recent archive), to verify that the archive is valid and that I can restore from it. That looks like:

borg extract -n 'faheem@server:/mnt/backup'::"$mailarchives[-1]"

However, this uses colossal amounts of data to copy everything locally. So, my question is whether it's possible to do all this remotely, and only transmit the result (whether success or failure) locally via ssh. I think it should be possible, but I don't know exactly how.

An even simpler example is

borg check faheem@server:/mnt/backup

which for some reason also consumes lots of data.

Also, despite appearances, this question isn't really Borgbackup specific. It could be phrased more generally as: if I have want to run a check on a remote machine, but which normally requires a lot of data to be downloaded locally if I want to run the check locally, can I run this check remotely, and just pass the result of success or failure to local?

And finally, a note from Borg's main/lead developer:

ThomasWaldmann> faheem: borg returns 0 on success, 1 on warning, 2 on error.