I’d like to submit a plea for rsync support. I have seen two posts where the reply is essentially “this is a hosting site, you shouldn’t need it.” (To be fair, it was stated much more diplomatically: “Just please keep in mind that we provide a website hosting service, meaning our services are supposed to be used for regular website hosting and administration activities.”)
I use a static web site generator (hugo) for my site. A change to the site may automatically update many files. Even a trivial change to the actual content can result in a change to many actual files. Identifying them is time consuming and the only real solution is to re-upload the entire site. That is far more time-consuming and bandwidth-consuming than it needs to be. This is exactly what rsync is good at. It would be great to have that tool available.
Yeah, I know the admin has said rsync is not available. That’s my my post’s title was “A plea for rsync support” – I’m begging for the admin to change their minds.
I’d also be curious as to why it’s not supported. It’s not rocket science. It would reduce their costs (less bandwidth than FTP). I don’t see how it’s a maintenance burden once set up.
Rsync indeed doesn’t work here because our hosting doesn’t support SSH/SFTP.
However, you may want to try Rclone instead. Like rsync, rclone is a useful tool to sync files between two systems. Except that Rclone doesn’t just support SFTP, but supports a long list of protocols, services and providers.
And of course, Rclone supports FTP too. So I think i will suit your needs.
Thanks for the more explicit reference to rclone. I looked at the documentation but haven’t tried it yet. Certainly looks like a better alternative than just bare FTP – which is what I assume it was.
I’m wondering if you’d consider making an explicit help article on it? Include rsync in the title so searches (like I attempted to do!) would turn it up.
I don’t think I’ll write an official guide right now. Searching the forum for rsync only shows three topics, including this one, so I wouldn’t say it’s a frequently asked question. But I’d be happy to accept a Community Guides about this though!