For years I have been regularly running the following command locally as a root filesystem backup in the hope I am safe:

rsync -aAXv --progress --delete / --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} -M--fake-super me@server:~/backup

Now that I actually need to restore it skeletons seem to fall out of the cupboard:

I found that symlinks became regular files on the remote end, containing the link as their content. I expected that the option -a implied -l to save symlinks as symlinks. Was it the fake-super that made the difference?

How can one restore from a backup made like that? I am currently running this as root, but owner becomes root everywhere so something must be wrong:

rsync -aAXv --progress --delete --fake-super -M--super me@server:~/backup /mount/point

Unfortunately the rsync manual is not straightforward to me with the fake-super related options. Can anyone help me out?