Once a year, we back up Tina’s Photos library to an external hard drive and deliver it to friends who keep it at their house, just in case ours burns down or something terrible. For whatever reason, it seems we can’t just drag her “Photos Library.photoslibrary” to an external hard drive or at least when we do, it seemingly spins forever without a good status updated. In steps rsync.

From Terminal.app, I pasted in the following command on her MacBook Pro while the backup drive is plugged in and this seems to do the trick with a live status update spewing in Terminal’s window.

sudo rsync --archive --stats --human-readable --progress /Users/christinaschwie/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary /Volumes/Tina\ Photos/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary

I should’ve published this as a tip for others. And even if you’re not syncing a 250+ GB photo library like this scenario, hopefully it helps you with your large directory transfer needs.

** UPDATE 2-15-2024 **

Resource forks may have been damaged using the above command. Next time, try it with “–hfs-mode=appledouble”, such as:

sudo rsync --archive --stats --hfs-mode=appledouble --human-readable --progress /Users/christinaschwie/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary /Volumes/Tina\ Photos/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary

Or install rsync with brew and then add –xattr to the command.

Or sudo rsync -xrlptgoXvHS --progress --delete --fileflags / /Volumes/BackupClone using tips here.