Not unless they've improved it substantially in the past decade.

A startup I worked for [0] shipped a backup/"DR" appliance using rdiff-backup behind the scenes that I had the pleasure of inheriting ownership of.

What rdiff-backup was good for was creating the false impression that you had working backups you could restore from. But once your available disk space for backups filled up, which is kind of the whole goal of a backup system; accumulate as many revisions going back as far as you have space for, the thing paints itself into a corner you can't recover from without creating potentially huge amounts of free space first.

Here's why:

1. The backup tree is modified in-place in the course of performing a backup. If the backup is prevented from finishing for any reason (admin/user cancelled, ENOSPC, power loss, backup source became unavailable, etc), the backup tree is left partially in the new revision and partially in the previous revision. Any subsequent operation, restore or backup, must first restore the backup tree to its previous version, using the same primitive restore algorithm rdiff-backup uses for general restores.

2. Unless you're restoring from the latest revision requiring no reassembly from differentials, the restore algorithm requires enough free space to store up to two additional copies of any given file having changes it's reassembling. This doesn't even include the final destination file, if restoring into the backup filesystem (as it does when recovering from an interrupted backup, mentioned in #1), you need space for the third copy too.

Maybe they've fixed these problems since my time dealing with this, it's been years.

I ended up writing a compatible replacement for my employer at the time which used hard link farms to facilitate transactional backups requiring no recovery process when interrupted. This also enabled remote replication to always have a consistent tree to copy offsite while backups were in-progress, something rdiff-backup's in-place modification interfered with. As-is you'd end up just propagating a partially updated backup offsite if it happened to overlap with an ongoing backup.

My replacement also didn't require any temporary space for reassembling arbitrary versions of files from the differentials. So it could always perform a restore, even with no free space available. I even built a FUSE interface and versioned backup fs virtualization shim for QEMU+qcow2 atop those algorithms. But it was all proprietary and some of the stuff got patented unfortunately.

I wouldn't consider rdiff-backup usable if it didn't at least have the ability to restore without free space yet. At least then it might still be able to do its rollback process when ~full, assuming it's still doing the in-place modification of the backup data.

Edit:

In case it's not clear from the above; it's particularly nefarious the way rdiff-backup would fail, since it was typically unattended automated backups that would fill the disks, leaving the backup tree in a rollback-required state to either run another backup OR restore. The customers usually discovered this situation when they urgently needed to restore something, and rdiff-backup couldn't perform any restore without first doing the rollback, which it couldn't do because there was no space available. Not that it could even perform a differential restore without free space, but the rollback-required state almost guaranteed a differential restore was required just to do the rollback.

Back when I was implementing the replacement it was such an urgent crisis that I was logging into customer appliances to manually restore files from sets of differentials without needing temporary space, using unfinished test programs before I had even started on the integration glue to streamline that process.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/axcient