I'm hosting a few Statamic (a file-based CMS) sites on a Hetzner VPS, and I wanted to download the files locally.

My first choice was scp and I ended up with something like this:

scp -r ploi@5.161.177.151:/home/ploi/[website_folder]/users/ ~/Documents/Projects/[local_project_folder]/

But on one of the sites, I have A LOT of files and scp is single-threaded and took forever.

So, I decided to look into rsync and came up with this

rsync -avz -e ssh ploi@5.161.177.151:/home/ploi/[website_folder]/content/ ~/Documents/Projects/[local_project_folder]/content/

Here's an overview of the command above:

  • -a: Archive mode. It preserves symbolic links, permissions, timestamps, and more.
  • -v: Verbose mode. It shows you detailed output during the transfer.
  • -z: Enables compression during the transfer.
  • -e ssh: Specifies that SSH should be used for the data transfer.

In the end, using rsync made the files sync 5x faster!