rsync.net

What rsync.net actually is

rsync.net is off-site backup storage in its most literal form: a UNIX filesystem, reachable over SSH, that you fill with whatever backup tool you already use. No agents, no proprietary client, no console wizard. rsync over SSH works. So do BorgBackup, Restic, rclone, git-annex, Duplicity, and anything else that can write files to a remote shell. The product page describes it as "an empty UNIX filesystem that you can access with any SSH tool", and that sentence is the entire product philosophy.

The company has been doing exactly this one thing since fall 2001, when John Kozubik launched it as a feature of his ISP, JohnCompanies; it was spun off as a stand-alone firm in the mid-2000s (the site's own pages say 2005 in one place and 2006 in another) dedicated only to off-site backup. It is a US-based company — small, private, and deliberately narrow. The list of things rsync.net does not sell is long: no compute, no CDN, no object storage API, no collaboration suite. Storage, snapshots, and support.

Two structural claims set it apart from the hyperscaler storage it competes with. First, rsync.net runs its own infrastructure — its own racks in its own facilities — rather than reselling someone else's cloud, and it has been built on FreeBSD and ZFS since 2012. Second, the ZFS layer gives every account point-in-time snapshots that are immutable from the client side: even if your credentials are compromised and an attacker deletes or encrypts your live files, the snapshots taken before the attack are still there, and your earlier state can be restored. For ransomware scenarios that property is the whole ballgame, and it is the single feature we would highlight first in a backup-target evaluation.

Pricing: what you really pay

The main pricing page is short enough to quote directly: "No Egress Charges | No Contracts | Student / .edu Discounts", then three tiers. 0-9 TB at 1.5 cents per GB per month with an 800 GB minimum order, full features at any location, 7 daily snapshots, and unlimited email/phone support. 10-99 TB at 1.25 cents per GB, adding 7 days plus 4 weeks of snapshots, physical media shipment, and free integration engineering. 100+ TB at 0.75 cents per GB, with free physical media shipment and 24/7 hotline support. Every account can configure custom snapshot schedules.

Run the arithmetic: the standard entry point is 800 GB at $0.015 per GB, which is $12 per month, and a terabyte costs $15 per month. Volume matters — a 50 TB commitment lands at $625 per month at the middle rate — and larger accounts buy lower rates, longer snapshot retention, and physical delivery options rather than a different product.

Discounted product lines exist for specific tools: borg accounts run 1.5 cents per GB per month with unlimited repositories and no snapshot bundle (you do versioning with borg instead), starting at 100 GB for $18 per year, with tiers down to 0.8 cents at 1-99 TB and 0.5 cents at 100+ TB; git-annex users get the same 1.5 cents rate with annual billing and a 100 GB minimum. These are the cheapest on-ramps if your workflow matches them.

How does that compare? Purely per terabyte, rsync.net is more expensive than Backblaze B2-class object storage and much more expensive than archival tiers. The no-egress-charge policy closes part of that gap the moment you actually restore data — restore-heavy workloads are where per-request, per-egress object storage bills get ugly, and where a flat per-GB price is simply calmer. There is no free tier; there is a free-forever 500 GB program for FreeBSD developers with @freebsd.org addresses, which tells you something about who the company thinks its neighbors are. Note also that third-party write-ups disagree wildly about what rsync.net charges — we have seen competitor pages quote $0.08 per GB and claim egress fees, which contradicts rsync.net's own published rates and its explicit no-egress policy. Where sources conflict, we go with the vendor's own pricing page and say so.

Performance & infrastructure

The network is the kind of claim a small provider can only make if it is true: a 10-gigabit, IPv6-capable network with a quintuple-homed primary US location. Four locations are listed on the site's locations page: Fremont, California (inside Hurricane Electric's core datacenter), Denver, Colorado (marketed as flood-free and seismically stable), Zurich, Switzerland (Equinix ZH4 with init7.net transit), and Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong. All locations run the identical platform at identical prices, and accounts can be migrated between locations at no charge — a flexibility the big storage vendors do not offer.

(One honesty note: some rsync.net pages say "five global locations" and "three US cities as well as Zurich and Hong Kong", while the locations page lists two US cities. We count four from the dedicated locations page and flag the inconsistency in our notes rather than picking the flattering number.)

The ZFS foundation is the reliability story. The platform has been ZFS-based since 2012, giving checksummed, self-healing storage and cheap snapshots; the company states it performs quarterly audits of power load and equipment failover, connects machines to at least two power circuits, and maintains biometric access controls and entry logs at its facilities (Denver and Zurich are listed as SSAE16/SAS70 certified). Its marketing for finance and healthcare cites 99.9999% resiliency and zero data-loss failures in 14 years. That last figure is a vendor claim and not something we can independently verify, but the shape of the operation — one product, own infrastructure, two decades — is checkable, and it checks out.

Compliance paperwork exists where enterprise buyers need it: HIPAA (with BAAs), GDPR, and Sarbanes-Oxley statements are published. Monitoring and alerting is included free — email, SMS, Pushover, and webhooks — which matters more than it sounds, because a backup target that fails silently is worse than no backup target.

Where it falls short

There is no web UI worth the name: account management is email-based, and the self-service story is thinner than any modern cloud console. If your team wants a dashboard with usage graphs, team roles, and an audit trail in the browser, this is not that product. Command-line fluency is a prerequisite, not an option.

Then the price math above: for large, cold, rarely-restored archives, per-GB pricing at 1.5 cents beats nothing and loses to object storage. The 800 GB minimum on standard accounts is a real floor — tiny archives pay for capacity they do not use, though the borg and git-annex lines lower that floor to 100 GB. Per-GB billing also means the bill moves with your data every month, which some buyers experience as honesty and others as unpredictability.

Scale of company is a risk factor of its own. A small private firm carries less balance-sheet risk than a startup burning venture money, but it also means a support team of humans rather than an org chart of account managers, and an SLA posture of "we answer the phone" rather than signed uptime commitments. rsync.net publishes no contractual uptime SLA; its resiliency claims are statistics, not commitments. Buyers who need a papered 99.9x% guarantee with credits must negotiate one or look at larger vendors.

The tooling story is deliberately thin: no first-party backup software, no scheduling, no orchestration. You bring your own, which is a strength for sysadmins and a wall for everyone else.

Who should pick this

Our pick for Linux, BSD, and macOS sysadmins who want an off-site target they can reach with standard tools and who value snapshot immutability against ransomware. It pairs beautifully with restic or Borg (see /category/backup-solutions): the backup tool does encryption, deduplication, and retention; rsync.net does durable, snapshotted, SSH-reachable storage with no egress bill and humans on the support line. Homelabs with 1-10 TB, studios shipping project archives, and regulated small practices that need a signed BAA all fit the profile.

We would look elsewhere when you want a managed backup product end-to-end, when your team lives in web consoles, or when you are storing tens of terabytes of cold archive and per-terabyte price is the only metric — B2-class object storage wins that arithmetic. Buyers who need a contractual SLA with credits should also compare enterprise storage vendors directly.

Key takeaways

• Off-site backup storage as a plain SSH-reachable UNIX filesystem; works with rsync, Borg, Restic, rclone, git-annex — no proprietary client.
• Operating since 2001 on its own infrastructure (FreeBSD + ZFS since 2012); four locations: Fremont, Denver, Zurich, Hong Kong, with free account migration between them.
• Simple pricing: 1.5 cents per GB/month (800 GB minimum = $12/month), 1.25 cents at 10-99 TB, 0.75 cents at 100+ TB; no egress charges, no contracts.
• Immutable ZFS snapshots (7 daily, more at larger tiers) are the standout defense against ransomware and accidental deletion.
• No web UI, no free tier, and no contractual uptime SLA — support is unlimited email/phone with real engineers.
• Best for command-line-fluent sysadmins who want honest, snapshotted backup storage; wrong fit for cold-archive price minimizers or console-driven teams.

Sources

• https://www.rsync.net/pricing.html
• https://www.rsync.net/products/locations.html
• https://www.rsync.net/resources/faq.html
• https://www.rsync.net/resources/about.html
• https://www.rsync.net/freebsd.html
• https://rsync.net/products/attic.html
• https://rsync.net/products/git-annex-pricing.html
• https://rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html
• https://www.rsync.net/industries.html
• https://servercrate.net/rsync-net-alternative
• https://dracon.uk/tools/object-storage-compare/rsync-net
• https://inetgeek.com/backup
• https://sumguy.com/rsync-net-encrypted-backup
• https://platform.tracxn.com/a/d/company/531ac9a0e4b0f7e166181d18/rsync.net