If you want to see the potential scale of the problem yourself here you are how to generate many small files:
for i in {1..20000}; do dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1 count=1 of=file$i; done
That is absolutely theoretical and totally uninteresting for real use cases - I prefer real files for such tests and proofed the results above!
For images or videos, which is the data I upload, there is nearly no difference at all between 1 and 4 parallel transfers! And therefor no reason to prefer rclone over rsync!
If you have such tiny files, you are right of course and I already stated that above and even before!
But as I wrote, what kind of files shall that be? 
I don’t have such tiny files.
And the theoretical advantage is exactly that: Theoretical!
My recommendation, ConsultheAlmostHuman
- Get the rclone download version
https://downloads.rclone.org/v1.73.5/rclone-v1.73.5-osx-arm64.zip
For ARM.
You only need the “rclone” binary - put it to /usr/local/bin or something, that is in the PATH for both your user and root.
You can update it like this:
tja@studio:~$ sudo rclone selfupdate
Password:
2026/04/26 15:15:51 NOTICE: Successfully updated rclone from version v1.73.4 to version v1.73.5
-
Use MacPorts instead of Homebrew
Anybody and their kids recommend Homebrew, but MacPorts is more stable, secure and reliable. -
Test the connection with a large file
Create a 1GB test file (see “dd” command above) and test the speed with that using both rsync and rclone.
Show your results here.
You could also “sudo port install mrt” and run this to your Hetzner URL, also post here:
sudo mtr -rwzc 100 x.hetzner.com
Feel free to remove your public IP first
- Are you sure that you want to upload your $HOME?
That means, you really want to upload all the Library stuff, that in part cannot even be read by your user?
Or better only “Documents” or something?
Myself, I don’t put anything into $HOME at all, storing everything on 2 external encrypted SSDs.
Thanks for the dialogue and the suggestions.
I’ll go through them, run tests, and report.