Preserve owner/group on TARGET

[Dan Robichaud]

Hello,

I've been using rsync for some time as a data migration tool, but this time
I'm trying to do something a little different, and I can't seem to make
things work the way I want.  Essentially, I want to rsync data from a
source, but I want the owner/group/perms on the TARGET to not change (i.e.
not get updated with the owner/group/perms from the source).  In testing I
discovered that using the -a or -ogp options WILL transfer over the
owner/group/perms, but when I leave out these options, the target file
becomes owned by root (the user running the rsync).  Am I missing something
really obvious, or is there no way to have the TARGET owner/group/perms
remain as-is?

To keep things simple, I have NFS mounted the source and target filesystems
and am rsyncing them as if they were local using the following command:

rsync -xvr --stats $SOURCEmnt/ $TARGETmnt

Thanks in advance for any help or advice.

Dan Robichaud