So apparently I’ve missed the big story of Apple introducing BSD licensed open rsync in macOS 15 Sequoia back in the Fall of 2024. (Thanks to Rich Trouton’s recent blog post).
Open Rysnc in macOS 15.4
Openrsync it’s new. And I didn’t notice it, because I’ve been using a newer Apple silicon compiled rsync (see RSKgroup) because Apple hadn’t updated the included rsync 2.6.9 in decades and it was becoming a problem. It seems the big break of only shipping the newer openrsync happened in macOs 15.4 because until 15.4 Apple gave the option to use either the SAMBA or the new BSD licensed version with an environment variable.
I use rsync a lot, for all my hand rolled artisanal backup scripts and the occasional push and sync between storage. Of course, for serious backups and archives I use Archiware P5 not the least because I need one dashboard to track backups, syncs, and archives, and more importantly I need to use LTO (tape backups) and Archiware is the best. As for useful terminal commands, rsync is often my go to for a lot of edge cases and quick storage comparisons.
Apple’s open source GitHub for Rsync
Open rsync was written by Kristaps Dzonsons in 2019 and is part of Open BSD but should run on all BSD or Linux distributions.