bup-margin(1) Bup 0.34+
Author: Avery Pennarun apenwarr@gmail.com
Date: 2026-09-01

# NAME

bup-margin - figure out your deduplication safety margin

# SYNOPSIS

bup margin [options…]

# DESCRIPTION

`bup margin` iterates through all objects in your bup repository, calculating the largest number of prefix bits shared between any two entries. This number, `n`, identifies the longest subset of SHA-1 you could use and still encounter a collision between your object ids.

For example, one system that was tested had a collection of 11 million objects (70 GB), and `bup margin` returned 45. That means a 46-bit hash would be sufficient to avoid all collisions among that set of objects; each object in that repository could be uniquely identified by its first 46 bits.

The number of bits needed seems to increase by about 1 or 2 for every doubling of the number of objects. Since SHA-1 hashes have 160 bits, that leaves 115 bits of margin. Of course, because SHA-1 hashes are essentially random, it’s theoretically possible to use many more bits with far fewer objects.

If you’re paranoid about the possibility of SHA-1 collisions, you can monitor your repository by running `bup margin` occasionally to see if you’re getting dangerously close to 160 bits.

# OPTIONS

--predict
  Guess the offset into each index file where a particular object will appear, and report the maximum deviation of the correct answer from the guess. This is potentially useful for tuning an interpolation search algorithm.
--ignore-midx
  don’t use `.midx` files, use only `.idx` files. This is only really useful when used with `--predict`.

# EXAMPLES

    $ bup margin
    Reading indexes: 100.00% (1612581/1612581), done.
    40
    40 matching prefix bits
    1.94 bits per doubling
    120 bits (61.86 doublings) remaining
    4.19338e+18 times larger is possible

    Everyone on earth could have 625878182 data sets
    like yours, all in one repository, and we would
    expect 1 object collision.

    $ bup margin --predict
    PackIdxList: using 1 index.
    Reading indexes: 100.00% (1612581/1612581), done.
    915 of 1612581 (0.057%)

# SEE ALSO

`bup-midx`(1), `bup-save`(1)

# BUP

Part of the `bup`(1) suite.