I'll never not upvote Veronica Explains. Excellent creator and excellent info on everything I've seen.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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I still prefer tar for quick and dirty same box copies.
tar cf - * | (cd /target; tar xfp -)
Rsnapshot. It uses rsync, but provides snapshot management and multiple backup versioning.
Yes, but a few hours writing my own scripts will save me from several minutes of reading its documentation...
It took me like 10 min to setup rsnapshot (installing, and writing systemd unit /timer files) on my servers.
I'm sure I could script something similar in under 10 (hours).
Yah, I really like this approach. Same reason I set up Timeshift and Mint Backup on all the user machines in my house. For others rsync + cron is aces.
Veeam for image/block based backups of Windows, Linux and VMs.
syncthing for syncing smaller files across devices.
Thank you very much.
I use syncthing.
Is rsync better?
Syncthing works pretty well for me and my stable of Ubuntu, pi, Mac, and Windows
I’m not super familiar with Syncthing, but judging by the name I’d say Syncthing is not at all meant for backups.
Syncthing is technically to synchronize data across different devices in real time (which I do with my phone), but I also use it to transfer data weekly via wi-fi to my old 2013 laptop with a 500GB HDD and Linux Mint (I only boot it to transfer data, and even then I pause the transfers to this device when its done transferring stuff) so I can have larger data backups that wouldn't fit in my phone, since LocalSend is unreliable for large amounts of data while Synchting can resume the transfer if anything goes wrong. On top of that Syncthing also works in Windows and Android out of the box.
its for a different purpose. I wouldn't use syncthing the way I use rsync
It's slow?!?
Compared to something multi threaded, yes. But there are obviously a number of bottlenecks that might diminish the gains of a multi threaded program.
With xargs everything is multithreaded.
That part threw me off. Last time i used it, I did incremental backups of a 500 gig disk once a week or so, and it took 20 seconds max.
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.
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.
comparing seafile to rsync reminds me the old "Space Pen" folk tale.
This exactly. I'd use rsync to sync a directory to a location to then be backed up by kopia, but I wouldn't use rsync exclusively for backups.
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.
Borg gang represent!
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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 single thread, one file at a time.
That would only matter if it's lots of small files, right? And after the initial sync, you'd have very few files, no?
Rsync is designed for incremental syncs, which is exactly what you want in a backup solution. If your multithreaded alternative doesn't do a diff, rsync will win on larger data sets that don't have rapid changes.
For a home setup that seems fine. But I can understand why you wouldn't want this for a whole enterprise.
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
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.
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