Restic also offers encryption and compression. That’s the selling point for me when dealing with dozens of TB

They also work together. restic uses rclone for backends other than the officially supported 7. rclone also has built-in restic integration.

rclone on it own is a syncing solution not backup.

Rclone doesn’t have deduplication. That’s just finding files with the same name. It’s different from deduplication used in backup software.

Think of grinding data in a big machine, and removing blocks that are redundant. You may have every file to be a single copy, and get significant space reduction.

rclone and restic are not direct alternatives. They have a slight overlap, but are also different. Rclone is more versatile for moving/copying files. Restic has snapshotting, pruning, client side encryption, deduplication, and compression. Restic actually supports rclone as a backend.