Copy links for local targets?

Currently rclone offers ignoring links or following them (copying their contents), which makes sense for cloud providers that don’t support such things. However, for local targets could these be copied as-is? I imagine that symbolic links and Windows shortcuts are orders of magnitude more common than hard links and junction points, and as standard files they should be simple to copy. Could these be added to the default copy/sync behavior for local targets?

A link is just a file so it would make sense to just copy the file with a switch rather than “following” them. I’d like if it would do that.

Yes please for this option. It seems really essential to me. ignoring links completely discards information which is often critical. Following them would often lead to huge amounts of duplication. Copying the link file itself is the desired behaviour if you’re using rclone to create an external backup of your system (as I would think most users will be). It’s the option which actually ‘clones’ the original.

I’ve been spending far more time in rsync than I’d like recently, and I suppose my real goal would be for the default local behavior of rclone to be similar to rsync’s “-a” option, i.e. attempt to preserve all common options such as links, permissions, ownership, modtime, etc. It stands to reason that this is the “common case” for complete backup, seeing as rsync made “-a” a shorthand for it.

Thoughts?