In my mind rsync is more complicated than the "tar | tar" idiom that I routinely typed. For important data, the real secret is the verification before deleting

In my mind rsync is more complicated than the "tar | tar" idiom that I routinely typed. For important data, the real secret is the verification before deleting source data. I used to have some simple scripts that did (more or less) the following on source and destination: find ... -print0 | xargs -0 -x md5 | sort >md5list I'd have high confidence my files were safely copied when I compared those checksum files. Nowadays I mostly use canned solutions like ditto or Carbon Copy Cloner (which uses rsync under the hood!) and let them do their thing. But I then also verify by using my own python script that uses "os.walk" to traverse the directory trees and uses "hashlib.hash256" to create file checksums.