For most uses, rsync -a (preserve all possible metadata, like cp -a) is preferable to rsync -r ; Also, unless you have a very large (breadth or depth) tree, yo

For most uses, rsync -a (preserve all possible metadata, like cp -a) is preferable to rsync -r ; Also, unless you have a very large (breadth or depth) tree, you can just let rsync synchronize the entire path - it is quite efficient, will pick up additional diretories (you need inotifywait -r for that, and AFAIK you still have an unavoidable race).