I would generally argue that rsync is not a backup solution. But it is one of the best transfer/archiving solutions.

Yes, it is INCREDIBLY powerful and is often 90% of what people actually want/need. But to be an actual backup solution you still need infrastructure around that. Bare minimum is a crontab. But if you are actually backing something up (not just copying it to a local directory) then you need some logging/retry logic on top of that.

At which point you are building your own borg, as it were. Which, to be clear, is a great thing to do. But... backups are incredibly important and it is very much important to understand what a backup actually needs to be.

Ive personally used rsync for backups for about....15 years or so? Its worked out great. An awesome video going over all the basics and what you can do with it.

Why videos? I feel like an old man yelling at clouds every time something that sounds interesting is presented in a fucking video. Videos are so damn awful. They take time, I need audio and I can't copy&paste. Why have they become the default for things that should've been a blog post?

Rsnapshot. It uses rsync, but provides snapshot management and multiple backup versioning.

Yeah it’s slow

What's slow about async? If you have a reasonably fast CPU and are merely syncing differences, it's pretty quick.

It's slow?!?

I'll never not upvote Veronica Explains. Excellent creator and excellent info on everything I've seen.

rsnapshot is a script for the purpose of repeatedly creating deduplicated copies (hardlinks) for one or more directories. You can chose how many hourly, daily, weekly,... copies you'd like to keep and it removes outdated copies automatically. It wraps rsync and ssh (public key auth) which need to be configured before.

I was planning to use rsync to ship several TB of stuff from my old NAS to my new one soon. Since we're already talking about rsync, I guess I may as well ask if this is right way to go?

I've been using borg because of the backend encryption and because the deduplication and snapshot features are really nice. It could be interesting to have cross-archive deduplication but maybe I can get something like that by reorganizing my backups. I do use rsync for mirroring and organizing downloads, but not really for backups. It's a synchronization program as the name implies, not really intended for backups.

The thing I hate most about rsync is that I always fumble to get the right syntax and flags.

This is a problem because once it’s working I never have to touch it ever again because it just works and keeping working. There’s not enough time to memorize the usage.

Tangentially, I don’t see people talk about rclone a lot, which is like rsync for cloud storage.

It’s awesome for moving things from one provider to another, for example.

Use borg/borgmatic for your backups. Use rsync to send your differentials to your secondary & offsite backup storage.

I need a breakdown like this for Rclone. I've got 1TB of OneDrive free and nothing to do with it.

I'd love to setup a home server and backup some stuff to it.

I use syncthing.

Is rsync better?

Syncthing works pretty well for me and my stable of Ubuntu, pi, Mac, and Windows

Veeam for image/block based backups of Windows, Linux and VMs.
syncthing for syncing smaller files across devices.

Thank you very much.

I still prefer tar for quick and dirty same box copies.

tar cf - * | (cd /target; tar xfp -)

I think the there are better alternatives for backup like kopia and restic. Even seafile. Want protection against ransomware, storage compression, encryption, versioning, sync upon write and block deduplication.

I used to use rsnapshot, which is a thin wrapper around rsync to make it incremental, but moved to restic and never looked back. Much easier and encrypted by default.

slow

rsync is pretty fast, frankly. Once it's run once, if you have -a or -t passed, it'll synchronize mtimes. If the modification time and filesize matches, by default, rsync won't look at a file further, so subsequent runs will be pretty fast. You can't really beat that for speed unless you have some sort of monitoring system in place (like, filesystem-level support for identifying modifications).

rsync for backups? I guess it depends on what kind of backup

for redundant backups of my data and configs that I still have a live copy of, I use restic, it compresses extremely well

I have used rsync to permanently move something to another drive though