Rsync is very good tool for copying data from remote machine in Linux. The best part of rsync is, if we have copied some data and then for some reason like network disconneced or reboot etc, our data copy gets interrupted before it completed 100 % then in that scenario if we use rsync, it resumes from the files already downloaded or if single big file is say 40% complete, then rsync will download only remaining files or remaining 60% thus saving both time and bandwidth.
If we copy the data using rsync command with defaults command line arguments, it doesn’t show us the speed at which data is getting copied and the % complete or remaining.
When situation is something like, we need to download 100GB file, then not seeing % remaining and speed makes you impatient to see whats happening and how much time you need to wait for completion.
This is usecase, where progress bar helps us. So using below command you can show the progress bar with rsync command.
$ rsync --progress -av -e "ssh" remote_username@remote_user_ip:/home/remote_username/Desktop/bigfile.zip localfolder/bigfile.zipNote the “–progress” argument which we passed along with the rsync command which copied bigfile.zip using ssh from remote machine.
For more details on refer to “How to copy files from one Linux machine to another using scp, rsync and ssh ?”