Re: What is rsyncrypto good for?

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> From: Shachar Shemesh <sh...@sh...>
> Date: Saturday, November 09, 2019 7:59 AM
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> [...]
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> In summary: I have moved on. People are not interested in what rsyncrypto has to offer, and I accept that. I wish I understood that, however, as it seems to me to be a genuinely superior solution (though, admittedly, more clunky) to what people are actually choosing.
> 

> Rsyncrypto can be made better. The file name can be stored, encrypted, inside the file to allow recovering the file map. I could think of a system that would integrate rsyncrypto and rsync, so that the files could be encrypted on the fly, saving local storage. I don't think those will change rsyncrypto's adoption in any significant ways, so I don't spend my time on them.

> 

> Shachar


I see three issues:

Encrypting your files makes it more likely you'll totally lose them by losing the encryption keys. After a successful natural disaster caused recovery of rsyncrypto encrypted files, I decided what I was storing was not sensitive enough to justify that danger.

Not having an on the fly mode ... it can be viewed as an additional backup for your data, but otherwise it's a pretty big deal if you have a lot to backup up. And high capacity disk drives are now engineered with heads so close to surfaces that they come with yearly maximum total reading and writing budgets, which are quite modest compared to the capacities drives are getting up to. Unless you use an "already am backing it up, and size and date modified have not changed" heuristic, reading the entirety of the files every day is *bad*.

To where do you backup your data offsite? rsync.net is great, but relatively expensive at rest compared to object store cloud offerings like AWS S3's lower classes and Glacier, Backblaze B2, Azure's archival offerings, etc. Rclone would appear to be the equivalent program for those, with its own limitations, including greater bandwidth use.

Ah, that brings up a 4th: rsync/rsyncrypto shines for files that have small portions changing, like log files, but today for many if not most users that's minuscule compared to media files that don't get changed. Compare to people with only a few computers to back up not finding deduplication compelling, because storage and bandwidth costs and capacities have changed so much.

- Harold