On the Debian side, rsync 3.2.7
On the iMac Pro side, rsync 3.2.7
Wired ethernet, 10GbE, send speed (in Mission Control) varies around 250MB/s to 500MB/s.
There are about 6.7M files to transfer. After ~42 hours, 1.1M have transferred.
This is what the output of the rsync command looks like:
Restic, on the other hand, is wicked fast backing up to the same external drive hanging off the iMac (even while rsync is simultaneously running). I'm using rsync because I would like to have a file-by-file backup, as this drive is being backed up to Backblaze, and without a file-by-file backup, I would be faced with restoring the whole restic backup (8TB) if I lost my external drive and needed to recover files.
Thanks for any suggestions!
Back in the day, we used to make a cpio archive on the fly, pipe it into ssh and un-cpio it at the other end, because that was faster than rsync for many files. Not sure why.