>I had somehow pigeonholed it as "for cloud to local or vice-versa", and never considered it for local transfer, like over my own LAN.
Huh. Exact same thoughts here. I never used rclone because I don't use AWS or similar, just lots of bare metal on and off my LAN that I can ssh to. I am quite comfortable with rsync's quirks and args, so not sure I'll quit using it, but maybe I'll try rclone next time I do a massive transfer. Similarly I've been shown that ddrescue can act as a full dd replacement, but I'm so used to dd I still tend to use it.
as always: imho (!)
tar is great, and well kown - but not particularly for "incremental backups over the net" ...
this is what rsync is/was for.
idk ... whatever the problem is with rsync, but apparently thats none of my business ;))
you could use, and which usage is very similar to rsync:
rclone
* https://rclone.org/
intro
* https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/4x-faster-network-fil...
and additionally its also faster than rsync ...
just my 0.02€