Rsync is brilliant and useful but gets very slow when you apply it outside of its sweet-spot. Remember: Rsync trades CPU and disk i/o (lots of disk i/o) for ne

Rsync is brilliant and useful but gets very slow when you apply it outside of its sweet-spot. Remember: Rsync trades CPU and disk i/o (lots of disk i/o) for network bandwidth. In the pathological case "thousands of tiny files over a fast network" it can easily be orders of magnitude slower than a straight tar.