I have a bunch of tar files in my machine which I want to transfer to an external hard drive (EHD); they where created preserving permissions (using the -p flag). I plan to use rsync to copy them to the EHD, but I wonder if it's necessary to transfer them in the so called archive mode (using the -a flag), since, as I understand, the main purpose of this mode is to preserve permissions, ownerships, etc.
Is it necessary to transfer `tar` files through `rsync` in archive mode?
rsync;backup;tar