Backup & Recovery (Rsync/Tar/Dd)

Watching rsync progress without clogging your logs

🧩 The Challenge

You ever kick off a massive multi-terabyte rsync and then spend the next hour wondering if it’s hung or just chewing through a million tiny files? Most people end up just running it with -v, which is a mistake because you end up with a wall of text that’s impossible to read while the transfer is actually happening.

💡 The Fix

Use the progress flag combined with a human-readable format so you get a live counter showing exactly how much data is left to copy. It changes the experience from guessing to knowing.

rsync -avP --stats /source/directory/ /destination/directory/

⚙️ Why It Works

Adding the P flag acts as a shortcut for –partial and –progress, which gives you that clean, updating bar for every single file being transferred. And throwing in –stats at the end ensures you get a final summary of file counts and byte transfer speeds that’s actually useful for calculating future backup windows.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Pipe that output to a file if you need a record, but keep the –stats flag so you don’t have to manually parse logs later.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 7/12/2026