I don't get it. I spent over an hour setting up on your empty promise about rsync support for Cloud Archive, and all I get is a broken mess. Everything gets re-uploaded, even if --update is set. Transfer just flat out fails for certain files without explanation and for no apparent reason. And all I find about it are ancient posts on here that never got replies. Why even offer that feature, then?
OVHcloud advertises rsync support for Cloud Archive because they provide an rsync gateway so you can connect and transfer files using rsync over SSH. This lets you upload/download data from the archive container through the rsync protocol just like normal object storage.
However, the behavior isn’t the same as a traditional filesystem rsync — it doesn’t track file metadata the same way, and often ends up re‑sending files instead of doing efficient incremental syncs. That’s because the storage backend is object storage (Swift), not a native filesystem, so rsync can’t detect changes in the usual incremental way. Many users find that rsync ends up resending all files every time, which makes it feel “broken” for real sync use cases.
So the short reason is:
It’s supported — OVH provides a gateway for rsync over Cloud Archive.
It doesn’t behave like a true incremental rsync on a filesystem — that’s just how the object storage backend works.
If you need efficient sync behavior (only sending diffs), rsync with Cloud Archive may not meet expectations because the archive service and rsync interaction are limited in how change detection works under the hood.
Oh sod off with that Corporate/AI response... No. It is not supported. It randomly breaks after a number of files with all sorts of errors that all don't make sense. Wrong protocol version (even though using the correct one), random i/o errors on the server, etc.
It's just broken.