a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool

-a, --archive
       This is equivalent to -rlptgoD. It is a quick way  of  saying  you  want  recursion  and  want  to
       preserve  almost  everything  (with -H being a notable omission).  The only exception to the above
       equivalence is when --files-from is specified, in which case -r is not implied.

       Note that -a does not preserve hardlinks, because finding multiply-linked files is expensive.  You
       must separately specify -H.

-t, --times
       This tells rsync to transfer modification times along with the files and update them on the remote
       system.   Note that if this option is not used, the optimization that excludes files that have not
       been modified cannot be effective; in other words, a missing -t or -a will cause the next transfer
       to  behave  as  if  it  used  -I,  causing  all files to be updated (though rsync’s delta-transfer
       algorithm will make the update fairly efficient if the files haven’t actually changed, you’re much
       better off using -t).

-z, --compress
       With  this  option, rsync compresses the file data as it is sent to the destination machine, which
       reduces the amount of data being transmitted -- something that is useful over a slow connection.

       Note that this option typically achieves better compression ratios than can be achieved by using a
       compressing  remote  shell  or  a compressing transport because it takes advantage of the implicit
       information in the matching data blocks that are not explicitly sent over the connection.

       See the --skip-compress option for the default list of file suffixes that will not be compressed.

-P     The  -P  option  is  equivalent to --partial --progress.  Its purpose is to make it much easier to
       specify these two options for a long transfer that may be interrupted.

Local:  rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [DEST]

Access via remote shell:
  Pull: rsync [OPTION...] [USER@]HOST:SRC... [DEST]
  Push: rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [USER@]HOST:DEST

Access via rsync daemon:
  Pull: rsync [OPTION...] [USER@]HOST::SRC... [DEST]
        rsync [OPTION...] rsync://[USER@]HOST[:PORT]/SRC... [DEST]
  Push: rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [USER@]HOST::DEST
        rsync [OPTION...] SRC... rsync://[USER@]HOST[:PORT]/DEST