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Copying Files & Directories in Linux with Progress Indication

I’ve long used rsync for high fidelity, detailed copies of large swathes of files in Linux. For example:

rsync -av --progress /source/directory /destination/directory

This gives you really nice, file-by-file progress indications — which is especially useful when moving large files across the network between machines or even locally across physical devices.

Today I was moving data from old hard drives and just wanted overall progress on the total job to be done. rsync still FTW!

rsync -a --info=progress2 /source/directory /destination/directory/

NB — do not use a trailling / in the source directory if you want the copied files to be retained inside of that directory name in the destination!

This provides lovely summary output like this:

ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/ubuntu$ rsync -a --info=progress2 /source/directory /destination/directory
  2,675,525,167  71%   13.49MB/s    0:03:09 (xfr#1281, to-chk=0/1712)

A Better, More Robust Way to Do This

Running this command gets some extra good stuffs.

rsync -a --info=progress2 --checksum --partial /source/directory /destination/directory/

Explanation of the Additions:

-checksum:

Ensures that files are compared using checksums rather than just timestamps and file sizes.
Guarantees that files are transferred only if their content differs, even if metadata like modification times are identical.

-partial:

Retains partially transferred files if the transfer is interrupted, allowing resumption without starting over.

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