Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a handy tip concerning something I didn’t know about. If you use dired—as you should—for your file operations and you know that you can use C to copy one or more files. By default, the command, dired-do-copy, copies symlinks by creating another symlink as the target.
Most of the time, that’s probably what you want but not always. It turns out you can make an actual copy of the file by specifying the universal argument. See mbork’s post for post for the details.