There's also --delete-before which might help if your destination is tight on available space. And, as usual with 'traditional' tools, man-page is pretty good, there's a ton of parameters which might be helpful. And, as @hades@feddit.uk already mentioned, compression (-z) may actually hurt performance if you have a lot of bandwidth or if you're copying over already compressed data like JPGs.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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I wasn't aware of the full impact of -z. Thanks for clarifying that for me (thanks to @hades@feddit.uk as well!). I'll definitely keep an eye on the speed with -z vs without it when I do my next dry run.
If I'm not mistaken, dry-run (-n) doesn't give you the results as it doesn't actually transfer nor compress data. It's only useful to verify that the command you'll testing will actually do what you want. For performance measurement you can use --progress and --stats.
-z might be pointless since you’re transferring files locally.
You have your answers, but I just want to note that what I do is run rsync from cron nightly, without the delete option.
Basically this reduces the chances of losing something by accidentally deleting it on the primary drive. Every few weeks/months, I run the rsync command with the delete option to clean up.
It's not a perfect backup by any means, especially since I could erroneously delete something right before that second rsync command and lose it for good. But it does provide a measure of safety.
I do about the same, something like rsync -av --delete
Thanks for sharing! glad to see the --delete item being the key.
Same here. My local backups are rsync -av --delete
I usually use rsync -azP --delete but I'm not sure if that's the best option.
Grsync makes this easier :)
never used it what is different/better to rsync?
Graphic interface, you just click options. And it has drop downs for favourite folders you've configured before so you can switch between backup/sync locations.
Once you apply it it shows you the CLI command as visual reference