Setting perms w/o using root

[Scott Moseman]

On some firewalled servers, I have rsync connecting as root between
them (using key based auth) and it works great for duplicating
directory trees.  I have the need to do the same thing on some
Internet facing servers, on which I do not allow root to ssh.  It
looks like this will not work when it comes to setting file
permissions accordingly.  Is there a workaround?  Or a good, secure
way I should be using ssh/rsync in this situation?

Thanks,
Scott