Unfortunately, it’s a big and complicated application. The manual page begins “There are eight different ways of using rsync. They are: …” and continues to describe each in excruciating detail. So, here’s the ultra-simplified version :

[sourcecode language='html']rsync -av –exclude ‘*.dump’ –exclude ‘temp’ user@host:/from-directory/ /to-directory[/sourcecode]

which means ‘copy everything from {/from-directory} on {host} (logging in as {user} ) to {/to-directory} on this machine. Except anything called “temp” or anything ending in “.dump”.

You can have as many —excludes as you like, though if there’s lots of them you can specify a file of them instead. This will copy symlinks over as-is, which may or may not be what you want. Presumably there’s a way to not do that. If you’re doing a local->local copy, just drop the “user@host: