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Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:01:45 -0600
From: Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu>
Subject: Rsync and Preservation of Ownership and Permissions
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	Rsync is a great utility, but is there a way to preserve
ownership and permissions if rsync remotely logs in to a backup
server as a normal user?

	The recovery process is run by root but copies all the
files from the backup server as a normal user and uses its root
capabilities to restore them.

	What happens now is that all the files end up owned by
and in the group of the user ID that copied the information from
the client to the server. That's obviously not too useful so I
suspect there is a better way than trying to make a remote login
to root from another system.

	Basically, cron starts a backup as root on system A.
System A makes a remote ssh connection using the -e flag to
backups@server. The system trying to recover the files starts a
rsync process as root which remotely connects to backups@server
to retrieve the files.

	In practice, the files come across but every last one of
them is owned by and in the group of user backups.

	Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Thank you.