General :: Replicating A Directory To Another Directory?

I have a directory /sanvol/ifr/ which contains 90,000 files and 2 subdirectories containing 60,000 files. I need to copy the contents of /sanvol/ifr to /sanvol/edm/. The cp command will not work because there are too many files.

I tried the following: find /sanvol/ifr/ type f -name '*' -exec cp -p {} /sanvol/edm/. ;

but this copies all files including whats in the subdirectories to /sanvol/edm/

I need to replicate exactly the contents of /sanvol/ifr/ to /sanvol/edm/ and preserve file attributes and dates.