--no-whole-file is the standard, except for local paths (on the same system, the delta-transfer algorithm would be a waste of work, as it reads src and dst to f

--no-whole-file is the standard, except for local paths (on the same system, the delta-transfer algorithm would be a waste of work, as it reads src and dst to find the delta with rolling checksums -- over the network it can save lots of time and bandwidth) --inplace is independent of that: it specifies writing directly to target files (instead of write to temp file and rename to target after completion)