"gsutil is not the recommended CLI for Cloud Storage. Use gcloud storage commands in the Google Cloud CLI instead." what's the difference?

[srcc-chekh]

per
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/rsync

I see there is now a note "Important: gsutil is not the recommended CLI for Cloud Storage. Use gcloud storage commands in the Google Cloud CLI instead."

Is there an explanation somewhere about the difference between "gsutil rsync" and "gcloud storage rsync"? Examining the python files in my google-cloud-sdk installation shows they are quite different but it's not clear to me if the features are actually any different.

So for example my original command
/usr/bin/gsutil -m rsync -C -e -P -r -x '(.gnupg|..fifo..|.cache|.Icon\r$|.fifo)' /data/dataset1 gs://backup-dataset1
will turn into
gcloud storage rsync -c --ignore-symlinks -P -r -x '(.gnupg|..fifo..*|.cache|.*Icon\r$|.fifo)' /data/dataset1 gs://backup-dataset1

but what's the difference? Do they hit the same REST API underneath anyway?

[srcc-chekh]

Similarly, I see "gsutil du -sh gs://BUCKET_NAME" now has the equivalent "gcloud storage du gs://BUCKET_NAME --summarize --readable-sizes"

[jsoref]

• gsutil rsync does not handle characters that are illegal on Windows remotely well see Cannot download file from the bucket with colon (:) in the name #1513
  • in theory gcloud storage rsync might, but in practice, it doesn't appear to do a great job either