How to back up server with rsync, preserving ownership/permissions without root login

Posted by olilarkin on Super User See other posts from Super User or by olilarkin
Published on 2012-10-09T00:20:42Z Indexed on 2012/10/09 3:40 UTC
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ssh

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rsync

I am setting up a backup server on which I want to run rsync over ssh to backup content on other servers every night. I would like to set up ssh keys to make it password-less, but I want to preserve ownership of files and permissions. There are a number of users on the server to be backed up which won't all exist on the backup server.

What would be the best way to do this? I guess the backup job will need to connect as root to , but I don't want to enable root ssh access on the servers.

thanks for any tips,

oli

ps, all servers are running UBUNTU Server 12.04 LTS and are behind a university firewall.

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