Transfer files: preserve meta-data

It very often occurs that you have a bunch of files both on your own system as well as on the computing cluster that you are working. In order to keep both in sync, it is advised that you preserve meta-data (created and modified dates) upon copying. You can do this for example as follows:

# normal copy
cp -p source destination

# remote copy using Secure Copy
scp -p source destination

# similar to "scp" but typically faster
rsync -a source destination