a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool

-L, --copy-links
       When symlinks are encountered, the item that they point to (the referent) is copied,  rather  than
       the  symlink.   In  older  versions  of rsync, this option also had the side-effect of telling the
       receiving side to follow symlinks, such as symlinks to directories.  In a  modern  rsync  such  as
       this  one,  you’ll  need  to  specify  --keep-dirlinks  (-K) to get this extra behavior.  The only
       exception is when sending files to an rsync that is too old to understand -K -- in that case,  the
       -L option will still have the side-effect of -K on that older receiving rsync.

-P     The  -P  option  is  equivalent to --partial --progress.  Its purpose is to make it much easier to
       specify these two options for a long transfer that may be interrupted.

-a, --archive
       This is equivalent to -rlptgoD. It is a quick way  of  saying  you  want  recursion  and  want  to
       preserve  almost  everything  (with -H being a notable omission).  The only exception to the above
       equivalence is when --files-from is specified, in which case -r is not implied.

       Note that -a does not preserve hardlinks, because finding multiply-linked files is expensive.  You
       must separately specify -H.