Foresight — preview-first rsync for Linux

See it

A GNOME-native window, driven entirely by the bundled rsync. Click any shot to enlarge.

Configure — add sources and a destination.

Remote sync over SSH — keys come from your agent, never the sandbox.

Advanced — move, unit-aware bandwidth limit, filter rules, extra flags.

Preview — every change, grouped, before it runs.

“What Foresight Can Do” — an honest, in-app capability list.

Nothing hidden — the boundary of what's exposed, and exact versions.

The bundled rsync's own --help, one click away.

Capability boundary and versions, enlarged

Why Foresight?

Seeing changes before they happen, in a native GNOME app that never touches your whole home directory.

	Change preview before sync	GNOME-native (GTK4)	Sandboxed (portals only)	Bundled, pinned engine
Grsync	~	✗	✗	✗
Back In Time	✗	✗	✗	✗
rsync CLI (`rsync -n`)	~	✗	✗	n/a
Foresight	✓	✓	✓	✓

Features

Everything driven by the bundled rsync — portals only, no host filesystem access.

Preview before you sync

A real rsync -n -i dry run, rendered as a grouped change list — created / updated / deleted / attributes — with deletions shown destructively.

Sources from anywhere

Add files and folders from different locations, each with a remove button, or drop them in from the file manager.

The right semantics, automatically

A single folder mirrors its contents into the destination; a file or several items are collected into it.

Live transfer

A real progress bar, current-file label, a log that opens with the exact rsync … command — and cancel at any time.

Deletions never surprise you

--delete runs a fresh dry run first and makes you confirm the exact list of files it will remove.

Sandboxed by design

A Flatpak that ships rsync 3.4.4 and touches your files only through XDG portals — never --filesystem=home.

…with the flags you actually reach for

The Advanced section covers the common knobs; Extra arguments passes anything else straight through.

Move, not copy

--remove-source-files as a single "Move files" switch — remove each source once it has transferred.

Bandwidth limit, sanely

--bwlimit with a unit picker: cap a big transfer to a disk's speed as 85 · MB/s, not 85000 KB/s.

Filter rules & an escape hatch

An ordered list of Include and Exclude patterns — rsync obeys the first rule that matches, so moving one up changes which wins. The Extra arguments field forwards any other rsync switch, tokenised — never through a shell.

Roadmap

Honest about what works today and what's next.

Dry-run preview, multi-source, live progress, cancel — all working today.
Advanced options — move, unit-aware bandwidth limit, filter rules, extra arguments.
Structured transfer log — a streaming activity list, one typed row per file and message, not a wall of text.
Saved presets — store an Advanced-option set and reapply it in one click.
Help / capability disclosure — an in-app, honest inventory of exactly which rsync flags Foresight exposes, checked against the bundled rsync --help.
AppStream metainfo, screenshots & landing page — the release metadata and this page.
First .flatpak release — an offline, reproducible bundle built from a GPG-signed tag, on GitHub Releases.
Self-hosted repo — a GPG-signed OSTree remote in its own foresight-repo, plus a .flatpakref, so flatpak update pulls new versions instead of re-downloading a bundle.
Excludes editor — exclude rules as a managed list with per-rule removal, replacing the space-separated field that could not express a pattern containing a space.
Include rules — the exclude list became an ordered filter list: each rule is an Include or an Exclude and can be moved up or down. rsync applies the first rule that matches, so position is the meaning — an Include above a broader Exclude carves an exception out of it, and an Exclude above an Include shuts a subtree even to it.
Remote sync over SSH — push to or pull from a user@host:/path endpoint. Your keys come from the desktop's SSH agent, so none ever enters the sandbox and ~/.ssh is never read; Foresight keeps its own known_hosts and shows you the fingerprint before trusting a machine for the first time. Either side may be remote, but not both — rsync refuses that. IPv6 link-local endpoints work, scope id and all.
A frozen preset format — it has churned three times; 1.0 is the promise that it stops. Every reader keeps reading all three encodings, so no saved rule set is lost to an upgrade.
After 1.0 — durable jobs — a named job that remembers its source and destination across restarts. The gate on everything below it: portal paths are handles rather than locations, so this gets solved through the documents portal, never by asking for your whole home directory.
After 1.0 — scheduling & run history — “every night”, or “when this drive appears”, as generated systemd user timers and mount units, with a record of what ran, when, what changed and what failed. No daemon of Foresight’s own, and scheduled runs keep the same dry-run-first discipline as interactive ones.
After 1.0 — snapshot backups (--link-dest) — hardlinked incremental trees, the thing that turns copies into backups. Still pure rsync.
Deliberately not planned, at any version — root or whole-system backups (they would gut the sandbox this app is built on), cloud-storage backends (rclone’s job, not rsync’s), and rsyncd hosting.
Distant future / speculative — optionally remember a password-based SSH or rsync-daemon credential in the system keyring (org.freedesktop.secrets) instead of a config file. A deliberate opt-in permission; key-based auth would never need it.