man rysnc says point blank that without the -l flag symbolic links will be ignored. -l, --links This tells rsync to recreate symbolic links on the remote system to be the same as the local system. Without this option, all symbolic links are skipped. However with the command below I continue to see symbolic links copied from source to destination rsync -avz --stats --exclude-from=$RSYNC_RC/.rsync-Mail_exclude \ $SOURCE/ $SOURCE2/ $DESTINATION/