--owner --group without root access?

[Philip Mak]

On Sun, 30 Dec 2001, Kevin Easton wrote:

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

My previous backup solution actually uses tar, but there's two problems
that I have with it:

1. My backup file, even when compressed with .bz2, exceeds 2 GB by a
little. The backup machine has an older kernel that doesn't support >2 GB
files and upgrading it is not an option because this is a dedicated
server.

2. tar archives are a pain to work with if I just want to go in and find
one specific file that I need to recover; it takes a long time to extract
a file.

Giving the situation some more thought, it might not be hard to be able to
use rsync to preserve file ownership without having root access.  It would
be just a matter of getting a "ls -lR" of the data, and having some
program that can parse that to recover the original file ownership if
necessary.

Has anyone already done something like this by any chance?