rsync backup: rsh or fuse.ssh?

[sl70]

I'm finally getting around to a reliable backup system for my Gentoo box. I've put a Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB 1TB external storage stick on my local network. The idea is to rsync to the pi's external storage, in a little script executed regularly in a cron job. I can (1) remotely mount the external storage on my Gentoo machine using fuse.sshfs. Or I can (2) do the backup without remotely mounting the storage, but running an rsync daemon on the pi and rsync'ing over the local network.

Is one of these two choices preferable? Clear advantages or problems with either of these?

TIA

[szatox]

When transferring data with rsync to a remote machine always use rsync protocol, either by runing a daemon or connecting via ssh/rsh. In particular rsync over ssh is very convenient.
Rsync protocol makes a very efficient use of network, searching for already transferred blocks of data and reusing them when possible (so they don't have to be sent again); rsync on a network mounted device will work like cp at best, and possibly much worse. Like in reading the target file just to figure out it's useless and needs to be replaced anyway, so it's from 1 to 2 operations for a smart update (read everything + write changes) instead of 1 operation a dumb copy would do (just write everything).
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[sl70]

Thanks, @szatox. Very useful information.