Unexpected results from rsync I am trying to use rsync for back up using this command:

rsync -vaE --progress --delete /source /destination


My goal is to have the destination be an exact copy of the source. I have updated rsync to 3.1.2 (using homebrew) on my iMac running 10.11.6.

My problem: I use Finder to originally copy /source to /destination. Using Get Info, I see the size and number of items in source and destination are exact matches. Then I run the rsync command above to ensure destination is an exact match to source, but it rewrites many files (incl resource forks, .DS_Store files, etc) before completing successfully. But if I do another Get Info on source and destination the size and number of items no longer match.

Shouldn't destination be an exact copy of source after rsync, with the same size and number of items, etc? Shouldn't rsync exactly match destination to source, incl resource forks, hidden files, etc.? I am very inexperienced at Terminal and would appreciate any help and guidance.

A further oddity: if I run rsync twice in a row, the second run still finds files to write/rewrite. Why is this? Shouldn't the first run have exactly synchronized the directories?
rsync option -E is OK for the standard but too old version 2.6.9 of rsync which is provided with MacOS X (Mavericks, Yosemite &amp; El Capitan).
But this option -E has another function with standard rsync.

For a user installer version 3.1.2 which is the right one on MacOS X,
then the standard options to maintain ACL and extended attributes are respectively -A and -X.

Here you should use:

rsync -aAvX --progress --delete /source /destination