I finally got some online storage to backup my home server to, and I can finally sleep easy when my house inevitably goes up in flames. My initial push has been with rclone using the sync command. I plan on running a daily or weekly push.

I’ve gone with Hetzner and they have a variety of options on how to connect to their storage box as they call it. They have an option for automatic snapshotting of, as I understand it, the entire storage box that you can then recreate.

So my thoughts are around rclones sync and copy commands, and the storage snapshots.
Copy) If I use copy, it won’t clear up deleted files automatically that I actually want gone.
Sync) With sync I’m worried that say a drive failed (my set up is a bit wonky currently until I can build a proper RAID), it will do a sync, see an entire directory is gone, and go ahead and delete it.
Snapshots) Here I’m worried that any new data that’s been added in-between the snap shot and a server failure would be lost. And I don’t you can retrieve partial data from a snapshot.

What I have in mind is to use rclone’s copy command, but then somehow have a retention period on files that no longer exist on my server. So a deleted file might exist in my storage bucket for a month before being removed from there as well.

How do you guys manage this? Are there any ready made solutions, or do I need to whip up a script that goes through and looks at the last modified dates and removes the old ones?