Permissions & Ownership

Permission Flags

Flag	Effect
-a	Preserves perms, owner, group, times (archive)
-p	Preserve permissions only
-o	Preserve owner (requires root)
-g	Preserve group
--chmod=RULE	Set permissions on destination
--chown=USER:GROUP	Set ownership on destination
--no-perms	Don't preserve permissions
--no-owner	Don't preserve owner
--no-group	Don't preserve group
-A	Preserve ACLs
-X	Preserve extended attributes

Common Patterns

# Preserve everything (standard)
rsync -av src/ dest/

# Set specific permissions on destination
rsync -av --chmod=D755,F644 src/ dest/

# Set ownership on destination
rsync -av --chown=www-data:www-data src/ dest/

# Ignore permissions (copy to NTFS/FAT)
rsync -av --no-perms --no-owner --no-group src/ /mnt/usb/

# Full metadata (Linux → Linux, both support ACLs)
rsync -avAX src/ dest/

# Fix permissions after transfer
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/
sudo find /var/www/html/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
sudo find /var/www/html/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

tip

--chmod=D755,F644 sets directories to 755 and files to 644 — the standard for web servers.