Suppose you have a directory called source, and you want to back it up into the directory destination. To accomplish that, you'd use: rsync -a source/ destination/ This command is equivalent to: cp -a source/. destination/ except that it's much more efficient if there are only a few differences. Just to whet your appetite, here's a way to do the same thing as in the example above, but with destination on a remote machine, over a secure shell: rsync -v -e ssh source/ username@remotemachine.com:/path/to/destination/ Note: -v, --verbose Display the names of files transferred and statistics related to the transfer. -e shell Use shell (which can be a complete command with arguments, enclosed in quotes) to create the connection between two systems for file transfer.