Using rsync to copy data locally

What can I say?! Rsync is awesome! The options I normally use for this is:

# rsync -aHAXEWPh source destination

The options above are explained below.

-a	--archive	Archive mode. Same as -rlptgoD.
-H	--hard-links	Preserve hard links.
-A	--acls	Preserve ACLs (implies -p)
-X	--xattrs	Preserves extended attributes
-E	--executability	Preserves the executability of a file.
-W	--whole-file	Copies whole files without delta operations.
-P	--progress	Indicate progress with output.
-h	--human-readable	Output numbers are in a more readable format.

See the man pages for more information

$ man rsync

I also like to use the --dry-run option too the first time I run it just to make sure its actually copying what I think it is. For example, you might run this.

root@repo:~# rsync -aHAXEWPh /srv/repositories-remote/ /srv/repositories-local/ --dry-run

Nothing will actually get copied with the dry-run option enabled so you’ll need to remove that when you’re sure about what you’re copying.