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.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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It's not bad if you don't need historical backups. I kinda think I do, so I use https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic becase rust
Restic (https://github.com/restic/restic) is probably a better choice if you're not a rust-freak like me.
Rustic scares me. I will 100% forget what tool I used to backup after 5 years and be unable to recover my files.
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
If you're trying to back up Windows OS drives for some reason, robocopy works quite similarly to rsync.
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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
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Grsync is great. Having a GUI can be helpful
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.