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.

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 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.

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