Is rsync faster then finder

[maflynn]

The title states it all, if I issue a rsync -av ~/ /Backup

Would that be faster then just dragging my home folder to the my backup external disk?

 

[shakenmartini]

The title states it all, if I issue a rsync -av ~/ /Backup

Would that be faster then just dragging my home folder to the my backup external disk?

Rsync should be faster and is easier to script.

Rsync also has a lot more advantages. For one, the Finder does not "merge" and update files, it does a whole sale replace.

For example, I use this perl script to backup my Documents folder in addition to my regular time machine backups.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Execute rsync
`rsync -ar /Users/$username/Documents/ /Volumes/$external/backup/`;

just replace the $ variables with values appropriate to your machine.

make sure you also run

chmod +x perlscript.pl

to make the script executable.

If you are running this automatically from a script you might want to omit the "v" flag as this causes a lot of output. There is also a huge performance hit for printing what it is doing, which when you do you initial backup will make a difference.