rirb VS dfb

rirb: Mimics the prior tools but is faster since it stores the state locally and saves you having to walk it again most of the time. Vanilla rclone to restore

The problem is, it has to list both sides every time which can be slow. So I wrote the (beta) tool, rirb, to avoid that. It hasn’t been tested on Windows but should work or only need minor mods. It is beta though so take it with a grain of salt. But you don’t need anything special to restore. (Unless you use rclone crypt)

I wrote a tool that mimics the above behavior with faster listings and some convenience things: rirb

I actually wrote a tool (rirb) that uses rclone but has its own logic to mimic

But I don't use them. Here is my logic for a tool I wrote (rirb) that mimics rclone but the sentiment holds:

Rclone can be a good backup tool with the backup-dir flag and a crypt wrapper remote but it’s not a complete solution. In fact, I wrote my own tool, rirb, that mimics it but makes life easier. My justification for this approach:

Really important stuff (i.e. photos) have those plus are in OneDrive. Every night, I run rclone (well, actually, my own wrapper) to back that up to Hetzner. And it’s synced to my work computer which then also backs up.

Full point-in-time: It is theoreitcally possible (see proof of concept) but it's fragile. If this is your primary use case, check out other tools such as restic or kopia

rirb -- Reverse Incremental Rclone Backup. Github Link

I used to use the method I will describe but the problem is that there is no server-side move in B2 so rclone does server-side copy. But server side copy is slow on B2. It works but I use my own tool called dfb that basically appends files with the date so you never need to move files. This also lets you use object lock if you want.

dfb: rclone powered but uploads all new/modified files with a date. Then you can slice in time to restore easily. To restore with vanilla rclone, you will need to remove the dates. Not hard but worth noting

I also wrote another (early beta) backup tool called dfb. This also does full file backups and can be restored without the tool but then needs some scripting to clean up names. The advantage is that it is “append only” (sans pruning) and can super easily roll back in time.

I published an early public beta here: https://github.com/Jwink3101/dfb