Products · Product
rsync
Raised as a usability problem by 11 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2016–2026), in 11 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Easy to use wrong flags, getting subtly wrong resultsUnreviewed
20162026- Easy to use the wrong flags, with subtle wrong results; needs man pages every time2026-09-10
- Command line with many flags is too hard for non-technical people to use2026-05-27
- Too many options and workflows documented with equal weight, hard to find default-equivalent flags2020-11-06
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 11 complaints
- Easy to use the wrong flags, with subtle wrong results; needs man pages every time2026-09-10
- IPv6 address brackets and colons break rsync argument parsing and need quoting workarounds2026-06-04
- Command line with many flags is too hard for non-technical people to use2026-05-27
- Trailing slash changes behaviour and conflicts with shell autocomplete, so users easily get it wrong2022-04-09
- Copying to an exFAT partition fails confusingly until you learn to skip permissions2021-11-28
- Easy to destroy backups by calling it wrongly, like missing a trailing slash2021-01-27
- Too many options and workflows documented with equal weight, hard to find default-equivalent flags2020-11-06
- Alternatives to Dropbox's sync are manual, with very basic or obtuse user experience2020-03-04
- Its interface is user-hostile because progress output is frozen to keep scripts working2019-07-09
- Can't tell how --include and --exclude precedence works, left to right or otherwise2019-03-29
- Help page lists a ton of options with no semantic ordering, hard to navigate2016-03-02