--owner --group without root access?

[Philip Mak]

Is there a way to preserve the owner and group permissions without having
root access?

Well, this is not possible on the filesystem level of course, but what
about storing the owner/group information in a supplementary file that can
be read by rsync to later reconstruct this information?

I'm using rsync to perform a server-to-server backup of a machine's hard
drive. If the hard drive being backed up were to actually fail, I would
want to be able to restore all the files with their exact ownership
information.

However, I think that needing to have root access on the backup server
should not be necessary to do this...