Parallel Rsync

January 17, 2021

rsync will run in sequential mode by default. This can cause transfers to take a long time, and it’s unlikely to make full use of your bandwidth if you’re copying many small files (for example, when syncing a home folder). This situation can be slightly improved by using xargs to run many parallel rsync operations:

ls /home/yourname | xargs -n1 -P8 -I% rsync -Pa % destination:/home/yourname/

You can adjust the -P argument to change the number of parallel processes to run.