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To setup a quick and efficient backup system, all you need is rsync and that’s it. Rsync is a very powerful tool that can do anything and everything that has to do with moving files around within and across different networks and securely. With rsync doing backups and restores can be as quick as a few blinks of an eye!

Rsync has many features and techniques that can be utilized to setup the perfect backup/restore solution. In this article, we’re listing a few very useful tools that compliment rsync to ensure that you’ve used it to it’s best capacity.

1. rsync-incr – a Linux wrapper shell (bash) script around rsync to perform automated, unattended, incremental, disk to disk backups, automatically removing old backups to make room for new ones. It produces standard mirror copies that are browsable and restorable without specific tools.
2. RSync Manager – a set of Python scripts to add and update packages for rsync-based mirror sites, and also create some nice HTML statistics from the logs. It is mainly written for large site management, with extensibility in mind.
3. Warsync – server replication system mainly used to sync servers in LVS clusters. It is based on rsync over ssh and has native support for Debian package synchronization.
4. Rsync Vault Manager – an archive manager that uses rsync to manage backups of multiple clients across multiple logical partitions.
5. Rsync Incremental Backup Script – an incremental backup system written using PHP, rsync, ssh, and cp. It can backup local machines and other networked devices, and is designed to be highly configurable and informative for system administrators. It performs a large amount of error checking, and includes logging and email capabilities.
6. Grsync – a GUI for rsync, the command line directory synchronization tool. While it can work with remote hosts, its focus is to synchronize local directories.
7. Rsyncrypto – allows you to encrypt a file or a directory structure such that they can later be synchronized to another machine using rsync.
   
8. Rsyncbackup – a handy tool for scheduled backups using rsync. rsyncbackup lets you easily setup multiple source folders and destinations, both locally, on your iPod or external firewire disk, or at a remote destination using ssh.
9. Rsync-backup – automates the process of backing up multiple systems to one or more backup servers. It focuses on making the process secure. It encrypts the backup going across the wire, only ships changed data, runs the server as root to preserve permissions and ownership, keeps people from seeing each other’s backups, and doesn’t require the server to trust any files sent from the clients.
10. Backup Buddy – a set of scripts which make versioned, disk-to-disk, backups via rsync easy. It allows the user to set up disk-to-disk backups that happen automatically.
11. Zsync – an implementation of rsync over HTTP. It allows updating of files from a remote Web server without requiring a full download or a special remote server application.
12. NasBackup – a solution for backing up desktop PCs, laptops, and servers to network disks. It is highly configurable and uses rsync to only transfer file differences over the network.
13. Rsnapshot – a filesystem snapshot utility based on rsync. It makes it easy to make periodic snapshots of local machines, and remote machines over ssh. It uses hard links whenever possible, to greatly reduce the disk space required.
14. OtheRSync – a program for the automatic, efficient, and safe synchronization of two machines over a network. It’s efficient (using compression and incremental changes), safe (uses ssh, is fail-safe, and makes backups of deleted files by default), uses parallel processing, and supports feedback through the commandline prompt.
15. Rsynchelper – helps you use the mirroring program rsync. rsynchelper makes it easier for groups of servers to cooperate in mirroring. rsynchelper makes it easier to make your content available for others to mirror, makes it easier to mirror someone else’s content, and it automates the maintenance of an accurate list of who is maintaining which content.

If you’re new to rsync and are not sure of it’s capabilities, try out some of the tools listed above which are developed for the sole purpose of using rsync as a backup solution.