Copy or rsync command

It's not really a question of what's more efficient.

The commands 'rsync', and 'cp' are not equivalent and achieve different goals.

1- rsync can preserve the time of creation of existing files. (using -a option)
2- rsync will run multiprocess and transfer using either local sockets or network sockets. (i.e. fork itself into multiple processes)
3- The multiprocessing, and threading will increase your throughput when copying large number of small files, and even with multiple larger files.

So bottom line is rsync is for large data, and cp is for smaller local copying. (MB to small GB range). When you start getting into multiple GB or in the TB range, go with rsync. And of course network copies, rsync all the way.

Keep in mind that while transferring files internally on a machine i.e not network transfer, using the -z flag can have a massive difference in the time taken for the transfer.

Transfer within same machine

Case 1: With -z flag:
    TAR took: 9.48345208168
    Encryption took: 2.79352903366
    CP took = 5.07273387909
    Rsync took = 30.5113282204

Case 2: Without the -z flag:
    TAR took: 10.7535531521
    Encryption took: 3.0386879921
    CP took = 4.85565590858
    Rsync took = 4.94515299797

if you are using cp doesn't save existing files when copying folders of the same name. Lets say you have this folders:

/myFolder
  someTextFile.txt

/someOtherFolder
  /myFolder
    wellHelloThere.txt

Then you copy one over the other:

cp /someOtherFolder/myFolder /myFolder

result:

/myFolder
  wellHelloThere.txt

This is at least what happens on macOS and I wanted to preserve the diff files so I used rsync.

I will prefer to use rsync with the following options

rsync -avhW --no-compress --progress --info=progress2 <src directory> <dst directory>

The above parameters can be defined as follows :

-a for the archive to preserves ownership, permissions, etc.
-v for verbose
-h for human-readable
-W for copying whole files only
--no-compress as there's no lack of bandwidth between local devices
--progress to see the progress of large files
--info=progress2 to see the overall progress
source directory path
destination directory path

I used rsynk to transfer 330G data from a local HD to a external HD via USB 3.0. It took me three days. The transfer rate went down to 800 Kb/s and rised to 50 M/s for a while only after pausing the job. It is a typical overbuffering issue. Bad experience for local file tranfers: as the name indicates, (R)sync stands for REMOTE-sync (optimized for tranfers via network). As often happens, I discovered the "-z" flag only after I wondered about the issue and looked for an understandment

rsync is much much better compared to cp because rsync copies whole files/directory only the first time. The next time when you use rsync command with the same files/directory, only new changes are copied to the destination folder, not the entire files are copied.