I have, more than once, made the mistake of doing a recursive find in producing a filtered directory tree of files to go into a tar and *not* eliminated directories from the list. It is..painful when your quick hack to cut down the list of files that go into the tar to just the bare minimum results in including large subdirectories again, and again, and again...

The behaviour of [link|http://rsync.samba.org|rsync] with regards to symlinks and hard links is configurable. I have found uses for pretty much all of those configuration options. And yes, following symlinks is most often what I need to do.

Cheers,
Ben