I was planning to use rsync to ship several TB of stuff from my old NAS to my new one soon. Since we're already talking about rsync, I guess I may as well ask if this is right way to go?
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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I couldn't tell you if it's the right way but I used it on my Rpi4 to sync 4tb of stuff from my Plex drive to a backup and set a script up to have it check/mirror daily. Took a day and a half to copy and now it syncs in minutes tops when there's new data
yes, it's the right way to go.
rsync over ssh is the best, and works as long as rsync is installed on both systems.
On low end CPUs you can max out the CPU before maxing out network---if you want to get fancy, you can use rsync over an unencrypted remote shell like rsh, but I would only do this if the computers were directly connected to each other by one Ethernet cable.
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rsnapshot is a script for the purpose of repeatedly creating deduplicated copies (hardlinks) for one or more directories. You can chose how many hourly, daily, weekly,... copies you'd like to keep and it removes outdated copies automatically. It wraps rsync and ssh (public key auth) which need to be configured before.
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Use borg/borgmatic for your backups. Use rsync to send your differentials to your secondary & offsite backup storage.
Grsync is great. Having a GUI can be helpful
Tangentially, I don’t see people talk about rclone a lot, which is like rsync for cloud storage.
It’s awesome for moving things from one provider to another, for example.
@calliope It’s also great for local or remote backups over ssh, smb, etc.
It has been remarkably useful! I keep trying to tell people about it but apparently I am just their main use case or something.
I would have loved it when I was using Samba to share files on my local network decades ago. It’s like a Swiss Army knife!
I tried rclone once because I wanted to sync a single folder from documents and freaked out when it looked like it was going to purge all documents except for my targeted folder.
Then I just did it via the portal...
rsync can sometimes look similarly scary! I very clearly remember triple-checking what it’s doing.
rclone works amazingly well if you have hundreds of folders or thousands of files and you can’t be bothered to babysit a portal.
It's fine. But yes in the Linux space. We tend to want to host ourselves. Not have to trust some administrator of some cloud we don't know/trust.
rclone does support other protocols besides S3. You can also selfhost your own S3 storage.
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The thing I hate most about rsync is that I always fumble to get the right syntax and flags.
This is a problem because once it’s working I never have to touch it ever again because it just works and keeping working. There’s not enough time to memorize the usage.
I feel this too. I have a couple of "spells" that work wonders in a literal small notebook with other one liners over the years. Its my spell book lol.
One trick that one of my students taught me a decade or so ago is to actually make an alias to list the useful flags.
Yes, a lot of us think we are smart and set up aliases/functions and have a huge list of them that we never remember or, even worse, ONLY remember. What I noticed her doing was having something like goodman-rsync that would just echo out a list of the most useful flags and what they actually do.
So nine times out of 10 I just want rsync -azvh --progress ${SRC} ${DEST} but when I am doing something funky and am thinking "I vaguely recall how to do this"? dumbman rsync and I get a quick cheat sheet of what flags I have found REALLY useful in the past or even just explaining what azvh actually does without grepping past all the crap I don't care about in the man page. And I just keep that in the repo of dotfiles I copy to machines I work on regularly.
tldr and atuin have been my main way of remembering complex but frequent flag combinations
Yeah. There are a few useful websites I end up at that serve similar purposes.
My usual workflow is that I need to be able to work in an airgapped environment where it is a lot easier to get "my dotfiles" approved than to ask for utility packages like that. Especially since there will inevitably be some jackass who says "You don't know how to work without google? What are we paying you for?" because they mostly do the same task every day of their life.
And I do find that writing the cheat sheet myself goes a long way towards me actually learning them so I don't always need it. But I know that is very much how my brain works (I write probably hundreds of pages of notes a year... I look at maybe two pages a year).
Most Unix commands will show a short list of the most-helpful flags if you use --help or -h.
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I need a breakdown like this for Rclone. I've got 1TB of OneDrive free and nothing to do with it.
I'd love to setup a home server and backup some stuff to it.
slow
rsync is pretty fast, frankly. Once it's run once, if you have -a or -t passed, it'll synchronize mtimes. If the modification time and filesize matches, by default, rsync won't look at a file further, so subsequent runs will be pretty fast. You can't really beat that for speed unless you have some sort of monitoring system in place (like, filesystem-level support for identifying modifications).
yeah, more often than not I notice the bottleneck being the storage drive itself, not rsync.
Can also use fpsync to speed things up. Handles a lot for you
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.
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If you're trying to back up Windows OS drives for some reason, robocopy works quite similarly to rsync.
Ah.. robocopy... that's a great 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.
I use cp and an external hdd for backups
that's great until it's not.
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.
If you want rsync but shiny, check out rshiny
Y’all don’t seem to know about rsbackup, which is a terrible shame for you.
(I mean the one on greenend.org.uk!)