I am doing a new setup, got most of the files in place from other places and then ran my rsync backup from the command line before putting it in crontab. Here is the rsync: rsync -ah --stats --delete /home/ /mnt/sdc1/backups/homebase/home Note that the directory ..../homebase/home did not exist prior to this command; it created it. So here are the stats: Number of files: 6190 Number of files transferred: 5944 Total file size: 4.25G bytes Total transferred file size: 4.25G bytes Literal data: 4.25G bytes Matched data: 0 bytes File list size: 263.95K File list generation time: 0.001 seconds File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds Total bytes sent: 4.25G Total bytes received: 113.93K sent 4.25G bytes received 113.93K bytes 29.60M bytes/sec total size is 4.25G speedup is 1.00 Why would files transferred be less than the number of files? For example, is there some option I need to move hidden files? I do not believe there are any symlinks under /home. Thanks for any help in puzzling this out. I would be greatly upset if some key file was not being backed up.