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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If you add --delete-before, it absolutely can delete stuff.
Yeah but then it's not really a good backup!
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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.
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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
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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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.
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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.
If you're trying to back up Windows OS drives for some reason, robocopy works quite similarly to rsync.
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Grsync is great. Having a GUI can be helpful
Rsync depends on OpenSSH, but it definitely isn't SFTP. I've tried using it against an SFTPGo instance, and lost some files because it runs its own binary, bypassing SFTPGo's permission checks. Instead, I've opted for rclone with the SFTP backend, which does everything rsync do and is very well compliant.
In fact, while SFTPGo's main developer published a fix for this bug, he also expressed intention to drop support for the command entirely. I think I'm just commenting to give a heads up for any passerby.
I tried to use it via tailscale but it disconnects very easily - is to be expected?