rsync -av folder $USER@$SERVER:/destination/path.
scp won't copy certain file types correctly. Rsync really is better here, and not just because of that.
scp won't copy certain file types correctly. Rsync really is better here, and not just because of that.
I'm not aware of any attributes that tar doesn't preserve.
Also, I find that if I'm going to copy the data once, I'm often going to copy it twice, or which to get a more up to date version of it at a later time. Rsync clearly wins in these cases.
Finally, from the compress flag on rsync: 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.
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.