# rsync 157 Hacker News commenters recommended rsync and 85 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 24 years (4 owners). **Verdict:** A decades-old, widely installed tool trusted for reliable copies and backups that skips unchanged files and preserves metadata, though recent 3.4.3 releases drew complaints about AI-assisted regressions. ## Why people recommend it - Rock-solid, trusted for decades (8 comments): "rsync is a gift to the world and we should be grateful and mindful of how much it has been quietly woven into the fabric of computing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48422445)) "You have a rock solid piece of software used by an infinite amount of people and other services. It works fine, does it's job" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343887)) "The peace of mind that it'd do the right thing and not needing to research flags are more than worth any speed tradeoffs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415103)) - Delta transfer skips unchanged files (3 comments): "I prefer rsync because of its delta transfer which doesn't resend files already on the destination, saving bandwidth." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857771)) "rsync will likely be faster if some files are already in the destination as it handles that intelligently" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868432)) "rsync speeds this up significantly since most (but not all) of the ISO is unchanged." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647636)) - Preserves metadata, exact copies (3 comments): "Besides being faster, with rsync and the right command options you can be certain that it makes exact file copies, together with any file metadata" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292978)) "rsync is one of the few utilities that preserve all metadata even when copying between distinct file systems" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057911)) "recent rsync versions (3.2.3 2020-08-06) can do it with the extra option --crtimes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49417236)) - Great for backups and restores (3 comments): "rsync is better if you are technical enough to use it to restore after destructive changes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135927)) "my primary line of defense is rsync to a server running ZFS with hourly snapshots" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850300)) "I eventually just wrote an incremental backup script in rsync. I'm much happier." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849982)) ## What people warn about - Regressions in 3.4.3 release (5 comments): "my systems recently updated to rsync 3.4.3, and as soon as that happened my backup system started to fail on anything but a full backup" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414870)) "Rsync should rightly loose reputation if the project allows the release breaking changes to follow the latest hype trend" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48436445)) "The real issue is the irresponsible use of buggy machine-generated code in a project that many people depend on." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345022)) - Concerns over AI-generated code (4 comments): "I was hoping that at least some solid bedrock of stadalone command-line tools would withstand the deluge of AI slop." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334214)) "The real issue is the irresponsible use of buggy machine-generated code in a project that many people depend on." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345022)) "I would expect a 10x change rate, even carried out by clones of the existing maintainers to result in more bugs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420855)) - Many flags, trailing slash confusion (4 comments): "Sure, I _can_ make rsync do any number of rarely-used optimizations, if I feel like studying the manpage for half an hour" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648740)) "an ancient command line application with a zillion flags on it is just about as user hostile as you can get" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48288194)) "would behave differently for 'rsync a b' vs 'rsync a/ b/', even though I added the slash for both sides." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49943787)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [rclone](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rclone.md): 95 recommend - [openrsync](https://hackerapproved.com/p/openrsync.md): 17 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "rsync", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rsync/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).