--owner --group without root access?

Kevin Easton s3159795 at student.anu.edu.au
Sun Dec 30 22:38:47 EST 2001


> 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...

You can do this by creating a tar archive of your filesystem (NOT compressed
though), and rsync that across to the backup machine.  Then you'll just have
to be root when you extract the tar archive to recreate the ownership/
permissions.  As long as you don't use compression, you'll still get the rsync
speedup.

    - Kevin.





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