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?
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
498 points (97.2% liked)
Selfhosted
52007 readers
855 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Thank you for putting into words what ive subconsciously been thinking for years. Every search result prioritizes videos at the top and I'm still annoyed every time. Or even worst I have to hunt through a 10 minute video for the 30 seconds of info I needed. Stoohhhhpppp internet of new! Make it good again!
Ad money.
Hear hear. Knowledge should be communicated in an easily shareable way that can also be archived as easily, in contrast to a video requiring hundreds of MB:s.
Especially for a command line tool
I tried to use it via tailscale but it disconnects very easily - is to be expected?
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.
I use rsync + ZFS for backups which includes historical backups
I never thought of it as slow. More like very reliable. I dont need my data to move fast, I need it to be copied with 100% reliability.
I'll never not upvote Veronica Explains. Excellent creator and excellent info on everything I've seen.
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).
Man ilove being autostic
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.
I still prefer tar for quick and dirty same box copies.
tar cf - * | (cd /target; tar xfp -)
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
Different tools for different use cases IMO.
But neither do backups.
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.
Yes but imagine.. 18 seconds.
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!
I would generally argue that rsync is not a backup solution.
Yeah, if you want to use rsync specifically for backups, you're probably better-off using something like rdiff-backup, which makes use of rsync to generate backups and store them efficiently, and drive it from something like backupninja, which will run the task periodically and notify you if it fails.
rsync: one-way synchronization
unison: bidirectional synchronization
git: synchronization of text files with good interactive merging.
rdiff-backup: rsync-based backups. I used to use this and moved to restic, as the backupninja target for rdiff-backup has kind of fallen into disrepair.
That doesn't mean "don't use rsync". I mean, rsync's a fine tool. It's just...not really a backup program on its own.
load more comments
(8 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
load more comments
(12 replies)
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.
load more comments
(3 replies)
view more: next ›