Monitoring Rsync Progress

The current version of rsync (at the time of editing 3.1.2) has an option --info=progress2 which will show you progress of the entire transfer instead of individual files.

From the man page:

There is also a --info=progress2 option that outputs statistics based on the whole transfer, rather than individual files. Use this flag without outputting a filename (e.g. avoid -v or specify --info=name0 if you want to see how the transfer is doing without scrolling the screen with a lot of names. (You don't need to specify the --progress option in order to use --info=progress2.)

So, if possible on your system you could upgrade rsync to a current version which contains that option.

You can disable the incremental recursion with the argument --no-inc-recursive. rsync will do a pre-scan of the entire directory structure, so it knows the total number of files it has to check.

This is actually the old way it recursed. Incremental recursion, the current default, was added for speed.

Note the caveat here that even --info=progress2 is not entirely reliable since this is percentage based on the number of files rsync knows about at the time when the progress is being displayed. This is not necessarily the total number of files that needed to be sync'd (for instance, if it discovers a large number of large files in a deeply nested directory).

One way to ensure that --info=progress2 doesn't jump back in the progress indication would be to force rsync to scan all the directories recursively before starting the sync (instead of its default behavior of doing an incrementally recursive scan), by also providing the --no-inc-recursive option. Note however that this option will also increase rsync memory usage and run-time.