search for: pretendroot

Is there a way to backup files to a remote machine on which I don't have root permission, while preserving their uids/gids? I know that only the super-user can set the owner and group of a file, so what I am actually looking for is a tool that would store the actual uids/gids of all files that are backuped by rsync in a kind of meta-file. This file could then be used to restore the files

i found a couple messages in the archives relating to backups vs. distribution and ownership issues without root privs that kinda touched on the idea of storing meta info (ownership, modes, acls) in a separate file. has anyone else looked at storing meta data in a side file of some sort? it seems that it could be done all on the client side. send over files with totally plain meta info and

Right now, if you want a faithful backup of a system, you must either have root access on the target machine (for chown, mknod, ...), or you have to arrange for fakeroot/pretendroot to wrap itself around the rsync server to catch all these permissions/etc and keep them in a database file. Also, the fakeroot approach isn't exactly reliable (premature exit -> all SAVED permission data is lost). My problem (and I assume that of others) is that I don't have/want...

how do you backup system files like /etc/ over ssh to another machine and keep permissions the same on the remote backup location ? i tried using -a flag, but because i'm connecting through ssh i'm not using Rsync module on the remote computer and therefore i cant write files as root so -a flag is not working. all the files are being written with owner SSH_USER and group SSH_USER_GROUP i