Surely restic or borg would be better for backups?
Rsync can send files and not delete stuff, but there's no versioning or retention settings.
For versioning/retention, just use snapshots in whatever filesystem you're using (you are using a proper filesystem like ZFS or BTRFS, right?).
How does that get sent over rsync though? Wouldn't you need snapshots on the remote destination server?
Why not just use a backup utility instead?
Yes, async copies files to the remote server, the remote server takes regular snapshots.
Why not just use a backup utility instead?
What is that utility providing that snapshots + rsync doesn't. If rsync + snapshots is sufficient, why overcomplicate it with a backup utility?
The main things that come to mind are you have to test/monitor 2 seperate actions instead of 1, and restores of single files could be more difficult since you need to login to the backup server, restore the file from a snapshot, then also copy that file back to your PC.
If you add --delete-before, it absolutely can delete stuff.
Yeah but then it's not really a good backup!
Maybe I am missing something but how does it handle snapshots?
I use rsync all the time but only for moving data around effectively. But not for backups as it doesn't (AFAIK) hanld snapshots
yeah, it doesn't, it's just for file transfer. It's only useful if transferring files somewhere else counts as a backup for you.
To me, the file transfer is just a small component of a backup tool.
Rsync is great. I’ve been using it to back up my book library from my local Calibre collection to my NAS for years, it’s absurdly simple and convenient. Plus, -ruv lets me ignore unchanged files and backup recursively, and if I clean up locally and need that replicated, just need to add —delete.
Here’s how I approach old and slow:
If you're trying to back up Windows OS drives for some reason, robocopy works quite similarly to rsync.
Y’all don’t seem to know about rsbackup, which is a terrible shame for you.
(I mean the one on greenend.org.uk!)
I use cp and an external hdd for backups
If you want rsync but shiny, check out rshiny
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