Grsync is great. Having a GUI can be helpful
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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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.
Ah.. robocopy... that's a great tool
I use syncthing.
Is rsync better?
Syncthing works pretty well for me and my stable of Ubuntu, pi, Mac, and Windows
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I still prefer tar for quick and dirty same box copies.
tar cf - * | (cd /target; tar xfp -)
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.
Veeam for image/block based backups of Windows, Linux and VMs.
syncthing for syncing smaller files across devices.
Thank you very much.
Here’s how I approach old and slow:
- Older software is mature and battle tested. It’s been around long enough that the developers should know what they’re doing, and have built a strong community for help and support.
- Slow is okay when it comes to accuracy. Would I love to back up my gigabytes (peanuts compared to some of you folks out there with data centers in your attics) in seconds? Yes. But more importantly, I’d rather have my data be valid for if I ever need to do any kind of restore. And I’ve been around the block enough times in my career to see many useless backups.
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!)
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?