Rclone simply copies data. If you `sync` `~/Documents` to your remote it will keep an exact copy.
This is a simple backup since you only have one version. Anything deleted, the next time it syncs, gets deleted.
Borg is a backup tool. Versioning is at its core. It does that efficiently by deduplicating file (chunks really) even if they’re not in the same location.
So with Borg, if you create a backup 1 of `~/Documents` today and a backup 2 tomorrow of `~/Documents` you can see both backups and work with each snapshot. The size it takes should be close to the amount of data changed in the whole source.
If you move directories or files inside, rclone has to reupload them. Borg detects but doesn’t have to store it again.
With rclone some remotes have versioning (Google Drive, Dropbox). This could help in this case, but it depends on the remote. With Borg this is built in and you can change the underlying storage and migrate without loosing any data. Using versioning with crypt would probably be a pain too due to the file names. Not sure if rclone has commands/flags to help with this that I simply don’t know about.
"Rclone simply copies data. If you `sync` `~/Documents` to your remote it will keep an exact copy."
...
"This is a simple backup since you only have one version. Anything deleted, the next time it syncs, gets deleted."
This is correct. It is widely advised to not consider a "sync" like this a proper backup.
However, for what it's worth, rsync.net does support rclone[1] and because of the ZFS snapshots that are created and maintained[2] in your account, you can just do a dumb sync because the retention is handled by the snapshots.
I am not sure if rclone is really the right tool for plain old cloud backups - I think rclone distinguishes itself for the ability to transfer data between cloud providers.[3]
