The documentation for -v says increase verbosity.
If the only thing you’re interested in is seeing more progress, you can chain -v together like so:
rsync -avvvhr /sauce/folder/ [email protected]:/dest/folder/
and you should see more interesting progress.
This could tell you if your copying requirements -a are stricter than you need and thus take a lot of unnecessary processing time.
For example, I attempted to use -a, which is equivalent to -rlptgoD, on over 100,000 images. Sending the incremental file list did not finish, even overnight.
After changing it to
rsync -rtvvv /sauce/folder/ [email protected]:/dest/folder/
sending the incremental file list became much faster, being able to see file transfers within 15 minutes