Ain't that the truth. I'm a network/infrastructure goon, and I use Python all the time to automate things, sort mountains of data, etc. etc. Sometimes when I'm stuck on how to do something I'll look it up and find myself staring at code on Stack Overflow that is completely alien to me. I suppose that sticks me in the "hobbyist" category... but, I usually end up learning something, so there's that.

Ugh, I meant sshfs mount. Pardon my error.

I expected as much - rsyncing an encrypted file system reduces rsync's functionality to that of Robocopy - any change to a file will result in the entire file being moved to the destination. For my purposes that's fine - I'm not working with large files that are frequently changed. But if needed could one use an encfs mount on top of an sshmount on the remote system, then rsync directly to that? Wouldn't the encryption still be occurring locally, or is there a big fat hole I'm not thinking of?

That's very cool. My staging point also serves as my local backup of the files (external drive), but there's no reason I couldn't mount the existing file system with the --reverse option, then rsync it where ever I please. Thanks!

Right, this. In my case, the local files aren't encrypted. I stage a backup to an encfs mount, then unmount and rsync the encrypted files to my cheap VPS many, many miles away. Yes, a small amount of metadata is visible, but not actual content. The scripts to do so aren't very long, and were fun to write, even for a relative newbie like me.

I was going to say something similar. EncFS + rsync over ssh. Somebody slap a GUI on my ugly shell script and let's sell this thing!