These are my preferred rsync commands to/from FAT and exFAT filesystems:
SOURCE_PATH="path/to/source/dir"DESTINATION_PATH="path/to/destination/dir"# Option 1. **Copy** from source to destination.## dry runtime sudo rsync -hvrltD --modify-window=1 --stats --info=progress2 \ --dry-run "$SOURCE_PATH/" "$DESTINATION_PATH/"# actual copytime sudo rsync -hvrltD --modify-window=1 --stats --info=progress2 \"$SOURCE_PATH/" "$DESTINATION_PATH/"# Option 2. **Mirror** from source to destination. # - CAUTION: this deletes files and folders that are on the destination but not# the source, thereby making destination dir *exactly match* the source dir.## dry runtime sudo rsync -hvrltD --modify-window=1 --stats --info=progress2 \ --delete --delete-excluded --dry-run "$SOURCE_PATH/" "$DESTINATION_PATH/"# actual copytime sudo rsync -hvrltD --modify-window=1 --stats --info=progress2 \ --delete --delete-excluded "$SOURCE_PATH/" "$DESTINATION_PATH/"For details, see my full answer here: Super User: Best rsync settings for copying and mirroring to or from FAT and exFAT filesystems
I booted onto an Ubuntu 22.04 live USB on a 2015 MacBook Air, then used the rsync commands above to back up the whole computer to an external exFAT SSD. To read the internal Apple APFS filesystem, I used linux-apfs-rw. My installation instructions are here.
