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      --copy-dirlinks, -k
              This option causes the sending side to treat a symlink to a directory as though it were a real directory.  This is useful if you don't want symlinks to non-directories to
              be affected, as they would be using --copy-links.
 
              Without  this  option,  if  the sending side has replaced a directory with a symlink to a directory, the receiving side will delete anything that is in the way of the new
              symlink, including a directory hierarchy (as long as --force or --delete is in effect).
 
              See also --keep-dirlinks for an analogous option for the receiving side.
 
              --copy-dirlinks applies to all symlinks to directories in the source.  If you want to follow only a few specified symlinks, a trick you can use is to pass them  as  addi‐
              tional source args with a trailing slash, using --relative to make the paths match up right.  For example:
 
                  rsync -r --relative src/./ src/./follow-me/ dest/
 
              This  works because rsync calls lstat(2) on the source arg as given, and the trailing slash makes lstat(2) follow the symlink, giving rise to a directory in the file-list
              which overrides the symlink found during the scan of "src/./".
 
              See the SYMBOLIC LINKS section for multi-option info.