Can rclone restore an entire OS?

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1

Can rclone restore an entire OS in the event of a HD failure?

I am asking because waltereaton wants to know on https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2121495-nice-example-backup-script?from_forum=213

2

It’s highly unlikely, rsync is equally as bad at doing this and since rclone seems to strive to be rsync with more tricks up its sleeve then as mentioned in that post it’s unlikely to do the job.
File level tools without shadow file copying/locking can never really hope to get a full OS level sync done.

On the other hand it’s perfect for document/personal data syncing.

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3

I think that is rclone’s sweet spot. Cloud providers (and rclone) don’t in general support unix permissions, ownership symlinks, device nodes etc - all the things you need to make a working OS.

I know that some people save and restore unix permissions and ownership like this

sudo getfacl -R /path/to/files > /path/to/files/perms

And restore with

sudo setfacl --restore= /path/to/files/perms
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Personally, I use the Linux dump command to create backup files, then use rclone to sync those to Amazon. If my home machine explodes then all I need is the rclone.conf file (saved in LastPass) so I can get the dump files back, and restore the whole machine.

I wrote this up when Amazon still had unlimitted storage. Today I use sync rather than copy, but the idea is still the same.

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