Restic vs Rclone vs Rsync: Choosing the Right Tool for Backups

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Backups are easy to ignore — until disaster strikes.

Whether it’s accidental deletion, disk corruption, or formatting the wrong drive inside a VM, having a reliable backup can save your bacon.

In the backup space, three tools often come up: rsync, rclone, and restic.

At first glance they seem similar, but they serve different purposes and make different tradeoffs.

Let’s explore what each does, how they work, and why restic’s incremental backup model is such a game-changer.

Rsync: The Classic Workhorse

Rsync is one of the oldest and most widely used file synchronization tools.

• It works by scanning your local filesystem and comparing it with a destination (local folder, another server, etc.).
• Only changed parts of files (deltas) are transferred, saving bandwidth.
• You end up with a mirror of your files at the target.

Pros:

• Simple and fast for keeping two directories in sync.
• Great over SSH.
• Low overhead.

Cons:

• Not a true backup — it doesn’t do versioning. If you overwrite or delete a file, rsync will overwrite or delete it on the backup side too (unless you carefully script snapshots).
• No built-in encryption.
• Cloud provider support is clunky.

RsyncProject / rsync

An open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer. It also has useful features for backup and restore operations among many other use cases.

WHAT IS RSYNC?

Rsync is a fast and extraordinarily versatile file copying tool for both remote and local files.

Rsync uses a delta-transfer algorithm which provides a very fast method for bringing remote files into sync. It does this by sending just the differences in the files across the link, without requiring that both sets of files are present at one of the ends of the link beforehand. At first glance this may seem impossible because the calculation of diffs between two files normally requires local access to both files.

A technical report describing the rsync algorithm is included with this package.

USAGE

Basically you use rsync just like scp, but rsync has many additional options. To get a complete list of supported options type:

rsync --help

See the manpage for more detailed information.

BUILDING AND INSTALLING

If you need to build rsync yourself, check out the INSTALL page for…

View on GitHub

Rclone: Rsync for the Cloud

Rclone started life as “rsync for cloud storage.”

It’s a command-line tool that talks to dozens of cloud providers (S3, GCS, OneDrive, Google Drive, Backblaze, etc.) and gives you a uniform interface.

• You can copy, sync, mount, or move data to and from cloud storage.
• Works with both local filesystems and remote cloud APIs.
• Optimized for large files (media, archives, datasets).

Where it shines:

• Uploading or syncing large datasets to the cloud.
• Scenarios where one file maps to one object in cloud storage.
• Integrating cloud buckets into your local workflow (it can even mount them like a drive).

Where it falls short for backups:

• No native versioning or incremental snapshots.
• If you sync and a file is deleted locally, it will vanish in the cloud too.
• Backups aren’t deduplicated or encrypted by default.

rclone / rclone

"rsync for cloud storage" - Google Drive, S3, Dropbox, Backblaze B2, One Drive, Swift, Hubic, Wasabi, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, Azure Files, Yandex Files

Website | Documentation | Download | Contributing | Changelog | Installation | Forum

Rclone

Rclone ("rsync for cloud storage") is a command-line program to sync files and directories to and from different cloud storage providers.

Storage providers

• 1Fichier 📄
• Akamai Netstorage 📄
• Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Object Storage System (OSS) 📄
• Amazon S3 📄
• ArvanCloud Object Storage (AOS) 📄
• Backblaze B2 📄
• Box 📄
• Ceph 📄
• China Mobile Ecloud Elastic Object Storage (EOS) 📄
• Cloudflare R2 📄
• Citrix ShareFile 📄
• DigitalOcean Spaces 📄
• Digi Storage 📄
• Dreamhost 📄
• Dropbox 📄
• Enterprise File Fabric 📄
• Exaba 📄
• Fastmail Files 📄
• FileLu 📄
• Files.com 📄
• FlashBlade 📄
• FTP 📄
• GoFile 📄
• Google Cloud Storage 📄
• Google Drive 📄
• Google Photos 📄
• HDFS (Hadoop Distributed Filesystem) 📄
• Hetzner Storage Box 📄
• HiDrive 📄
• HTTP 📄
• Huawei Cloud Object Storage Service(OBS) 📄
• iCloud Drive 📄
• ImageKit 📄
• Internet Archive 📄
• Jottacloud 📄
• IBM COS S3…

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Restic: The Backup Specialist

Restic is built for one purpose: reliable, secure backups.

How it works:

1. Restic scans your files and splits them into chunks.
2. Each chunk is hashed (content-addressable storage).
3. Only new/changed chunks are uploaded.
4. Backups are stored as snapshots — point-in-time collections of files.

This means:

• If a file hasn’t changed, it isn’t uploaded again.
• If only part of a file changes, only the changed chunks are uploaded.
• Snapshots share chunks, so you can keep hundreds of backup versions without wasting space.

Key features:

• Incremental backups out of the box.
• Deduplication (two identical files, or even identical parts of different files, are stored once).
• Encrypted by default.
• Works with many backends: local disks, S3, Backblaze, rclone remotes, etc.

restic / restic

Fast, secure, efficient backup program

Introduction

restic is a backup program that is fast, efficient and secure. It supports the three major operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows) and a few smaller ones (FreeBSD, OpenBSD).

For detailed usage and installation instructions check out the documentation.

You can ask questions in our Discourse forum.

Quick start

Once you've installed restic, start off with creating a repository for your backups:

$ restic init --repo /tmp/backup
enter password for new backend:
enter password again:
created restic backend 085b3c76b9 at /tmp/backup
Please note that knowledge of your password is required to access the repository.
Losing your password means that your data is irrecoverably lost.

and add some data:

$ restic --repo /tmp/backup backup ~/work
enter password for repository
scan [/home/user/work]
scanned 764 directories, 1816 files in 0:00
[0:29] 100.00%  54.732 MiB/s  1.582 GiB / 1.582 GiB  2580 / 2580 items  0 errors  ETA 0:00
duration: 0:29, 54.47MiB/s
snapshot

…

View on GitHub

Restic + Rclone: Best of Both Worlds

This is where the Hacker News comment comes in.

• Restic supports many backends directly (S3, GCS, Azure, etc.), but not every cloud service.
• Rclone fills that gap. You can point Restic at an rclone remote, and it will use rclone as a transport layer.
• Result: Restic gets access to dozens of storage providers without having to implement each one.

So you might:

• Use rclone directly to back up big, static files (movies, archives) where deduplication doesn’t matter.
• Use restic (sometimes via rclone) for documents, code, configs — the stuff that changes incrementally and needs version history.

Incremental Backups: What Does That Mean?

When people talk about incremental backups, they mean only changes since the last backup are stored.

• In rsync, this means sending only changed file parts, but the remote ends up as just the latest state — no history.
• In restic, each backup run creates a new snapshot, but only new/changed chunks are uploaded. Snapshots reuse old chunks where possible.
• This lets you roll back to any previous backup point in time, without wasting storage.

Example:

• Day 1: Backup file.txt (1MB).
• Day 2: Only 10KB changes in file.txt. Restic uploads just those changed chunks.
• Day 3: You delete file.txt locally. Restic snapshot still references it, so you can restore it anytime.

This is why the commenter said restic "nailed incremental backup" — it gives you versioned history with minimal overhead, something rclone/rsync don’t do by themselves.

Why Restic Can Be Better

• Safety: You can restore old versions even if files were deleted.
• Efficiency: Deduplication saves huge amounts of space.
• Security: Everything is encrypted before upload.
• Flexibility: Works with local disks, S3, or any rclone remote.

Rclone is unbeatable for cloud syncing and large-file storage, rsync is the simplest choice for direct server-to-server sync, but when it comes to serious backups with history, encryption, and efficiency, restic is the clear winner.

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