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Normally, when tar archives a symbolic link, it writes a
block to the archive naming the target of the link. In that way, the
tar archive is a faithful record of the file system contents.
When --dereference (-h) is used with
--create (-c), tar archives the files
symbolic links point to, instead of
the links themselves.
When creating a portable archive from a directory that adversaries cannot modify, consider using --dereference (-h): some systems do not support symbolic links, and moreover, your distribution might be unusable if it contains unresolved symbolic links. See Symbolic Links.
When reading from an archive, the --dereference (-h)
option causes tar to follow an already-existing symbolic
link when tar writes or reads a file named in the archive.
Ordinarily, tar does not follow such a link, though it may
remove the link before writing a new file. See Options Controlling the Overwriting of Existing Files.
The --dereference option is unsafe if an untrusted user can
modify directories while tar is running, or if extracting
from an untrusted archive into a nonempty directory. See Security.