Some introduction web pages talking about it. https://blog.akendo.eu/rsync-scp/ http://superuser.com/questions/393608/difference-between-scp-and-rsync Some differences: 1) Performance scp will be faster 2) Security scp is more secure, but if you were to use rsync -avz -e ssh, then rsync would be as secure 3) Capability rsync can 'sync' the two copies, so lets say if your scp stopped in middle of the transfer for some reason (network issue lets say), you could use rsync to complete the transfer. scp will simply overwrite. alias scpresume="rsync --partial --progress --rsh=ssh" rsync can also exclude certain subdirectories/files using the --exclude flag, scp can't do that.