How we sync files between two drives

We have two external hard disks that we use to keep backups of our data.
The way we do that is by using the command rsync that makes our life easy.

Specifically, we use the following command to synchronize the first hard disk with the second one:

rsync -avh --delete --progress "path/to/source" "path/to/destination";

rsync is a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool, it is available in almost every system (GNU/Linux, Unix (MacOS as well) and Windows).

The parameters we use are the following:

• -a, --archive enables archive mode which is equal to -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X)
  In more detail it enables all of the following options
  -r, --recursive recurse into directories
  -l, --links copy symlinks as symlinks
  -p, --perms preserve permissions
  -t, --times preserve modification times
  -g, --group preserve group
  -o, --owner preserve owner (super-user only)
  -D same as --devices --specials
--devices preserve device files (super-user only)
  --specials preserve special files
• -v, --verbose it increases verbosity of the output
• -h, --human-readable outputs numbers in a human-readable format
• --delete deletes extraneous files from destination directories
• --progress shows progress during transfer

This post is also available in: Greek