I was migrating /var directory on some on-premises server I was working on from a low space disk to a larger one and I had to use the infamous rsync for this. I found the necessary parameters to on this article but I didn’t like the idea of copying & pasting blindly without knowing what each parameters do. So I just looked the man page of rsync and decided to document what I found here for future references.

The full command I used:

rsync -aqx /var/* /mnt/newvar

Here’s a table with each flag explained:

Flag Usage
-a Shorthand for -rlptgoD
-r Recursive
-l Copy symlinks as symlinks
-p Preserve permissions
-t Preserve modification time
-g Preserve group
-o Preserve user
-D Preserve devices files & special files
-x Don’t cross filesystem boundaries ()
-q Make it quiet

The -x flag means don’t copy other filesystem files and directories like NFS, Samba, ..etc. 1