On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 12:04 PM, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
Note -a does not do -HSX, and you're only passing -S. Both -H and -S have significant overhead, so pass them iff you need them.
-a implies -D, so don't bother.
Looks like -a also omits -A, though that's never stung me. -X stung me once due to capabilities(7); IIRC samba also uses it.
Thanks to everyone for their very helpful advice, especially Craig, Mike and Trent. I've done a few test runs on a few small subdirectories, and the bottleneck seems to be the USB 2.0 interface of my computer, with plenty of RAM, CPU and network capacity to spare. On a test run copying to my internal SSD, tar was significantly faster than rsync (around 5X faster in my particular setup), but when copying to the external HDD, as I said it was the USB 2.0 interface that was bottleneck, so I've decided that I might as well use the more reliable tool, rsync for the job. Also thanks for the tips on rsync. I can't believe that in over 14 years of using Linux as my main desktop OS, I had never used this tool. Looking back, it could have been very useful in a few situations were cp and cpio and tar left a lot to be desired. Cheers -- Aryan