Nice write up. rsync is great as an application but I found it more cumbersome to use when wanting to integrate it into my own application. There's librsync but the documentation is threadbare and it requires an rsync server to run. I found bita/bitar (https://github.com/oll3/bita) which is inspired by rsync & family. It works more like zsync which leverages HTTP Range requests so it doesn't require anything running on the server to get chunks. Works like a treat using s3/b2 storage to serve files and get incremental differential updates on the client side!