Comments

• RestrictedAccount@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  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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• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • tal@olio.cafe ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I would generally argue that rsync is not a backup solution.

    Yeah, if you want to use rsync, you’re probably better-off using something like rdiff-backup, which makes use of rsync to generate backups and store them efficiently.

    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.

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    • melfie@lemy.lol ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Having a synced copy elsewhere is not an adequate backup and snapshots are pretty important. I recently had RAM go bad and my most recent backups had corrupt data, but having previous snapshots saved the day.

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    • neidu3@sh.itjust.works ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      +1 for rfiff-backup. Been usinit for 20 years or so, and I love it.

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  • non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I use rsync and a pruning script in crontab on my NFS mounts. I’ve tested it numerous times breaking containers and restoring them from backup. It works great for me at home because I don’t need anything older than 4 monthly, 4 weekly, and 7 daily backups.

    However, in my job I prefer something like bacula. The extra features and granularity of restore options makes a world of difference when someone calls because they deleted prod files.

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• mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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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  • Eldritch@piefed.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    And I generally enjoy Veronica's presentation. Knowledgable and simple.

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    • mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Her https://tinkerbetter.tube/w/ffhBwuXDg7ZuPPFcqR93Bd made me learn a new way of looking at data. There was some tricks I havent done before. She has such good videos.

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  • eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It works fine, my issue with that it’s just not efficient. If you want a “time travel” feature, your only option is to duplicate data. There, compression, and encryption for off-site backups is where other tools shine.

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    • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I have it add a backup suffix based on the date. It moves changed and deleted files to another directory adding the date to the filename.

      It can also do hard-link copied so that you can have multiple full directory trees to avoid all that duplication.

      No file deltas or compression, but it does mean that you can access the backups directly.

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    • nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Agree. It’s neat for file transfers and simple one-shot backups, but if you’re looking for a proper backup solution other tools/services have advanced virtually every aspect of backups it pretty much always makes sense to use one of those instead.

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  • confusedpuppy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I use rsync for many of the reasons covered in the video. It’s widely available and has a long history. To me that feels important because it’s had time to become stable and reliable. Using Linux is a hobby for me so my needs are quite low. It’s nice to have a tool that just works.

    I use it for all my backups and moving my backups to off network locations as well as file/folder transfers on my own network.

    I even made my tool (codeberg.org/taters/rTransfer) to simplify all my rsync commands into readable files because rsync commands can get quite long and overwhelming. It’s especially useful chaining multiple rsync commands together to run under a single command.

    I’ve tried other backup and syncing programs and I’ve had bad experiences with all of them. Other backup programs have failed to restore my system. Syncing programs constantly stop working and I got tired of always troubleshooting. Rsync when set up properly has given me a lot less headaches.

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• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • pathief@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s single thread, one file at a time.

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• quick_snail@feddit.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’s slow?!?

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  • okamiueru@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    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.

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• Mio@feddit.nu ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I think the there are better alternatives for backup like kopia and restic. Even seafile. Want protection against ransomware, storage compression and block deduplication.

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• vext01@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• Xylight@lemdro.id ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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

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• probable_possum@leminal.space ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  rsnapshot is a script for the purpose of repeatedly creating deduplicated copies (hardlinks) for one or more files. 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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  • Cyber@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Hardlinks need to be on the same filesystem, don’t they? I don’t see how that would work with a remote backup…?

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• ryper@lemmy.ca ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Cyber@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It depends

    rsync is fine, but to clarify a little further…

    If you think you’ll stop the transfer and want it to resume (and some data might have changed), then yep, rsync is best.

    But, if you’re just doing a 1-off bulk transfer in a single run, then you could use other tools like xcopy / scp or - if you’ve mounted the remote NAS at a local mount point - just plain old cp

    The reason for that is that rsync has to work out what’s at the other end for each file, so it’s doing some back & forwards communications each time which as someone else pointed out can load the CPU and reduce throughput.

    (From memory, I think Raspberry Pi don’t handle large transfers over scp well… I seem to recall a buffer gets saturated and the throughput drops off after a minute or so)

    Also, on a local network, there’s probably no point in using encryption or compression options - esp. for photos / videos / music… you’re just loading the CPU again to work out that it can’t compress any further.

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  • Suburbanl3g3nd@lemmings.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I couldn’t tell you 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

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  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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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• surph_ninja@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Use borg/borgmatic for your backups. Use rsync to send your differentials to your secondary & offsite backup storage.

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• BCsven@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Grsync is great. Having a GUI can be helpful

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• i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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  • oddlyqueer@lemmy.ml ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This is why I still don’t know sed and awk syntax lol. I eventually get the data in the shape I need and then move on, and never imprint how they actually work. Still feel like a script kiddie every time I use them (so once every few years).

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    • tal@olio.cafe ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      sed can do a bunch of things, but I overwhelmingly use it for a single operation in a pipeline: the s// operation. I think that that’s worth knowing.

      sed 's/foo/bar/' will replace all the first text in each line matching the regex “foo” with “bar”.

      That’ll already handle a lot of cases, but a few other helpful sub-uses:

      sed 's/foo/bar/g' will replace all text matching regex “foo” with “bar”, even if there are more than one per line

      `sed ‘s/([0-9a-f]*)/0x\1/g’ will take the text inside the backslash-escaped parens and put that matched text back in the replacement text, where one has ‘\1’. In the above example, that’s finding all hexadecimal strings and prefixing them with ‘0x’

      If you want to match a literal “/”, the easiest way to do it is to just use a different separator; if you use something other than a “/” as separator after the “s”, sed will expect that later in the expression too, like this:

      `sed ‘s%/%SLASH%g’ will replace all instances of a “/” in the text with “SLASH”.

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  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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. And I just keep that in the repo of dotfiles I copy to machines I work on regularly.

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    • muix@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      tldr and atuin have been my main way of remembering complex but frequent flag combinations

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    • tal@olio.cafe ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Most Unix commands will show a short list of the most-helpful flags if you use --help or -h.

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• solrize@lemmy.ml ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I’ve been using borg because of the backend encryption and because the deduplication and snapshot features are really nice. It could be interesting to have cross-archive deduplication but maybe I can get something like that by reorganizing my backups.

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  • cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I think Arch wiki recommends rsync for backups

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• CannedYeet@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  If you want rsync but shiny, check out rshiny

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• tal@olio.cafe ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  slow

  rsync is pretty fast, frankly. Once it’s run once, if you have -a or -t passed, if the modification time and filesize matches, by default, rsync won’t look at a file further. You can’t really beat that for speed unless you have some sort of monitoring system in place (like, filesystem-level support for identifying different files).

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  • eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    yeah, more often than not I notice the bottleneck being the storage drive itself, not rsync.

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  • timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Can also use fpsync to speed things up. Handles a lot for you

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• Landless2029@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• calliope@retrolemmy.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Eldritch@piefed.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • TehNomad@piefed.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      rclone does support other protocols besides S3. You can also selfhost your own S3 storage.

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    • calliope@retrolemmy.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      [deleted]

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  • Landless2029@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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…

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    • calliope@retrolemmy.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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• portnull@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Maybe I am missing something but how does it handle snapshots?

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  • eleijeep@piefed.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You get incremental backups (snapshots) by using

    --link-dest=DIR         hardlink to files in DIR when unchanged
    

    To use this you pass in the previous snapshot location as DIR and use a new destination directory for the current snapshot. This creates hard links in the new snapshot to the files which were unchanged from the previous snapshot, so only the new files are transferred, and there is no duplication of data on disk (for whole-file matches).

    This does of course require that all of the snapshots exist in the same filesystem, since you cannot hard-link across filesystems.

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  • eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    yeah, it doesn’t, it’s not a backup tool, it’s just for file transfer. It’s only useful if transferring files somewhere else counts as a backup for you.

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• Jessica@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  If you’re trying to back up Windows OS drives for some reason, robocopy works quite similarly to rsync.

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  • Cyber@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Ah… robocopy… that’s a great tool

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• dohpaz42@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Here’s how I approach old and slow:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

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• tomkatt@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• dum_lion@feddit.uk ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Y’all don’t seem to know about rsbackup, which is a terrible shame for you.

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  • dum_lion@feddit.uk ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    (I mean the one on greenend.org.uk!)

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• Tiger_Man_@szmer.info ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I use cp and an external hdd for backups

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  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    that’s great until it’s not.

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• stratself@lemdro.id ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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 the 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.

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