Differences between the rsync delete options:

Differences between the rsync delete options:

--del/--delete_during: Deletes files from the destination dir as they are copied (saves memory
compared to --delete-before: --delete-before makes a separate scan to look for deleteables)

--delete: Deletes files in the destination directory if they don't exist in the source directory.

--delete-before: Delete files in the destination directory before coping file-with-same-name from
source directory

--delete-during: Delete files in the destination directory WHILE copying file-with-same-name from
source directory

--delete-delay: Mark deletes during transfer, but wait until transfer is complete

--delete-after: Receiver deletes after transfer, not before...If some other part of the rsync moved
extra files elsewhere, you'd want this instead of --delete-delay, because --delete-delay decides
what it's going to delete in the middle of transfer, whereas --delete-after checks the directory for
files that should be deleted AFTER everything is finished.

--delete-excluded: Deletes files from the destination directory that are explicitly excluded from
transferring from the source directory.

The point of rsync is not copying, it is archiving. This is an important distinction. Processing
deleted/changed files is critical, and in many cases nuanced.

The --delete flag in particular is one I've seen screwed up many times. A lot of people use rsync to
move files to low priority storage, and in this case you want the files you're moving to still EXIST
in the destination directory. That's not what delete does: --delete makes sure that, when you delete
a file from the source directory, it is ALSO deleted from your destination directory, so your
destination doesn't get full of junk... Once saw a guy wipe out his backup by putting in a new
drive, and not turning off his nightly rsync script. Script saw that the source dir was now empty,
and it deleted every file in the destination dir, so they'd match.

Most of the other options are space or performance related. When you delete the files is important
if you want to make sure the transfer is successful before you do anything, but if your device is
too small to handle 2 copies of all the information, you need to delete as you go, etc. It's a
little wacky because of it's long history across multiple platforms: some options have been added so
that people who were used to certain behavior wouldn't be confused.