Checking Out Rclone

I get these random ideas in my head to try new things. For years I have been using Rsync to upload this site after rebuilding it. Rsync has served me well, but I came across Rclone some time ago. The latter has multi-threading, which means it should be faster at syncing. I wanted to give it a try, so I did. I just like trying new tools. I do think Rclone’s output is a little cleaner, but I don’t really pay too much attention to that with Rsync. The advantage that Rsync has is that it is basically pre-installed everywhere and his been around for decades. Rclone, written in Go, isn’t pre-installed everywhere.

It actually seems to be a little slower, but I do like the output of Rclone a bit better that Rsync’s was. That is just my personal preference. I did have a little trouble getting it set up at first when I had a typo in the configuration file. That was solved pretty quickly.

I did have another gotcha when it copied everything over to the server, and that took quite a while with all my pictures and other files. That was my error. I had left the ~/ in the path. It happily created a ~/ folder instead of starting at the home directory. I do believe the command is a little cleaner since the server information just has a name. If I had read the manual better, I could have avoided this, but I tend to just dive in with just enough understanding, then learn by breaking things.

Once I got over the learning curve, it worked about the same as Rsync. I just think it is fun to try out different tools from time to time.

What it got me thinking is how spoiled I have become by speed. Zola takes less than two minutes to generate this entire site. I think the weather stuff takes up the most time. I find myself sitting here thinking it is taking too long. All those years ago, I used to write the HTML by hand. That took tons of extra time to write the tags, and I always had to go back and fix ones I forgot to close and stuff like that. Zola handles all that in second for thousands of pages now?

Having lived through using dial-up internet era, I should appreciate how fast cable internet is. I do, but I find myself wanting symmetric fiber and waiting impatiently for Glofiber to build here. They were supposed to have done it, but I think the borough screwed around too long approving it, and they got a contract for Lancaster. We don’t really need fiber! We really just want to stick it to Comcast for its poorly maintained cables. Their ever-increasing prices and shady fees go along with that. For years we have had random drops. Also, the fiber would be cheaper. Really, it is just the competition that has been needed for a long time after being stuck in Comcast’s natural monopoly.

Even on my phone, the connectivity speed is orders of magnitude faster than that old dial-up was. Website latency is pretty bad with all the trackers and stuff, but uBlock takes care of a lot of that. I should have the ability to decide what gets run on my machine, not some random, yet incompetent web developer that uses tons of black box frameworks.