Practical uses for rsync
 

I have a few questions about rsync.

1. Is rsync good at handling over 100gb of data to backup from a hard drive to another? (I understand it will then do incremental backups but I want to know if it can hand 100gb at least.)
2. Can you schedule rsync for let's say at the end of every month?
3. If I make a backup of an entire hard drive (using rsync) onto an empty hard drive, could that hard drive be used to boot/would it be fully functional as the hard drive with the original files? (if you need me to develop more on this I can)

Thank you guys, I am looking at failsafe solutions for backups (I use backlash for most backups but I want a backup with a standard format that does not depend on bacula)

rsync can handle any amount of files of any size.
rsync itself has no scheduling mechanism, but you can easily use cron for scheduling your backup commands.
It depends: If you use the same partition layout on the backup disk (and do not use UUIDs for recognizing partitions) the system is able to boot, but you will also have to install a bootloader (and possibly update it, when necessary).

Oh I see, so would it be worth to do a backup of the entire system once a month (incremental after the first month) or backup only certain folders?

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a limit somewhere, but a few days ago I used rsync to transfer about 30TB between a couple of servers without issue, FWIW.

I usually only backup configuration files and my personal data. Full system backups are only done when I am experimenting with something that may bork my system, but that happens rarely, nowadays most of my experiments are done in a VM whenever possible.

It also depends on which distribution you use, on a Slackware system with many manually compiled packages a full system backup makes more sense than on a Debian system, where all you need to recreate the system is the package list and config files.