Yeah, no. CCC goes way above and beyond. Creating verifiable, bootable copies, being able to bundle tasks together, creating recovery volumes, being able to backup locally, remotely or to images etc etc.

Rsync is a good tool but CCC gives massive quality of life. Some of that won’t even be possible with rsync. And rest would require building a complicated set of scripts. Paying Bombich, to deal with all the headaches and mac os shenanigans, $50 every couple of years is a much better deal.

And its not a lock-in like other backup tools. You can access specific files inside the backup without CCC.

CCC + Arq cover all my bases when it comes to backup and restore.