Snapshots let you very easily revert back to an older snapshot. They’re relatively fast and lightweight.

You should have offsite backups too. Snapshots won’t help if your computer catches fire, gets stolen, etc. Rsync is okay, but has a bunch of downsides:

• It only gives you a single copy.
• If the source data gets corrupted, the backup copy will also get corrupted.
• It’s not safe from ransomware since the client has full write access to the rsync backup (and thus malicious code could delete the backup).

A backup solution like Borgbackup + borgmatic or restic is a better solution and solves the above issues:

• You can easily take daily backups - all the data is deduplicated so it won’t take much more space (assuming you’re not changing every file every day).
• Multiple backups means that if newer data is corrupted, you can just pull files from an older backup.
• Borgmatic has an append-only mode that only allows a client to add new data to a backup, and not delete any old data. This prevents the client from being able to erase the backups