Since i have 70 websites on my droplet I want to copy my nginx and letsencrypt folders then compress them and lastly send them to S3.

Im thinking of using the cp -a command which they tell me preserves symlinks and pretty much everything within the folder structure (permissions for example).

After that i would like to use the tar -czf command to compress the folder before sending it to S3

Is this a sane way of doing this?

Also, a different question: what is the advantage of using rsync intead of cp -a i mean cp -a it’s pretty straight forward. Why would i want to use rsync in this case? (to backup the whole letsencrypt folder for example) .

Thanks in advanced!