Apple - Best rsync options to transfer data between two Mac

Personally, I'd be inclined to drop the z switch. Compression is only really useful over very slow connections (mobile data, dial-up) as the CPU is likely to become the bottleneck. I've certainly seen a drop in throughput with compression enabled.

Assuming your network is trusted, you would do well to use a more efficient, but perhaps less secure SSH cipher as this will probably speed up the operation a little (it certainly helps with VNC over SSH, or X11 forwarding over SSH).

• Run ssh -Q cipher on both systems and pick a cipher common to both
• Use it with rsync -vhaHE --progress -e "ssh -c aes256-cbc" andrea@imac:/remote/dir /local/dir/ 2> errors.log

PS: I also use the -h switch to get more human readable numbers in MB/s as opposed to b/s

Turns out blowfish and arcfour were disabled by default for security reasons (as of OpenSSH 6.7), so the above suggestion no longer works.

However, the good news is you can use one of your system's secure ciphers instead.

To see a list, run: ssh -Q cipher and then use the one of your choosing:

rsync -azvP --progress -e "ssh -c <insert-cipher-here>" user@hostname:/source /destination