How to use Rsync to copy only specific subdirectories (same names in several directories)

Question

I have such directories structure on server 1:

• data
  • company1
    • unique_folder1
    • other_folder
    • ...
  • company2

Answer 1

An alternative to Andron's Answer which is simpler to both understand and implement in many cases is to use the --files-from=FILE option. For the current problem,

rsync -arv --files-from='list.txt' old_path/data new_path/data

Where list.txt is simply

company1/unique_folder1/
company2/unique_folder1/
...

Note the -r flag must be included explicitly since --files-from turns off this behaviour of the -a flag. It also seems to me that the path construction is different from other rsync commands, in that company1/unique_folder1/ matches but /data/company1/unique_folder1/ does not.