4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)

A creator syncing giant video projects says the quiet part out loud: swapping rsync for rclone with parallel streams made network copies feel turbocharged — roughly 4x faster. Cue the comment fireworks. The rclone hype squad led by baal80spam calls it “fantastic and underrated,” while rsync traditionalists roll their eyes and cry foul: it’s not the tool, it’s your setup.

Practical minds jump in with tips: cachius points to rclone’s “multi‑thread streams” (think many hands moving boxes at once), even comparing it to Windows’ robocopy. Others add you can run multiple rsync jobs too — the real trick is splitting files efficiently. The nerdy curveball? indigodaddy brings up rsync’s superpower: hard links (a space‑saving way of avoiding duplicate files). Does rclone handle that as cleanly? The thread pauses to side‑eye.

Then the skeptics arrive. digiown argues there’s “no intrinsic reason” more streams should beat one on a local network — if it helps, you’ve uncovered a bottleneck or bad tuning, not magic. Another theme emerges: SSH, the secure transport rsync often uses, wasn’t built for high‑throughput firehoses, so performance tweaks matter. Meanwhile, ericpauley casually drops that rclone’s file system library is so good they baked it into internal Go tools. Flex. Between victory laps, tuning lectures, and “grandpa rsync vs zoomer rclone” jokes, one thing’s clear: speed wins, but the comment section wants receipts and real‑world edge cases, not just a stopwatch.