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.