Using --ours did what I was after, just discarding the incoming cherry picked file. @Juan you're totally right about those warning messages needing to say what they did't do, not just why they didn't do it. And a bit more explanation that the ambiguity from the conflict needs to be resolved (by using --ours, etc) would be super helpful to this error message.

I`m getting "rsync warning: some files vanished before they could be transferred (code 24) at main.c(1518) [generator=3.0.9]" on one of my systems i`m backing up with rsync , but rsync doesn`t show WHICH files.