From my past Unix & alike experience with Cromix/SVR5/BSD and SunOS/Solaris, I seem to remember faintly that there was a difference between "cp -r" and "cp -R". Both copied recursively directories and files, while -R (possibly) also followed symlinks and copied their targets. On SUSE Linux (which first version 1993 is told to orginate from the most Unix like Slackware), the man pages for cp just say -R, -r, --recursive copy directories recursively A previous thread on Stack Exchange, "Difference between cp -r and cp -R (copy command)", mentions additionally POSIX defined and implementation dependency. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/18712/difference-between-cp-r-and-c... So I am used with "cp -R" for complete directory backup purpose; else I use more effective "rsync" incremental backups to portable (USB) disks. . What do you use and think here about this?