I'm setting up rsync to backup my files to a separate computer every night. I've found some very good docs which have made the process very simple to setup and use.

I have 1 problem howerver: My backups all have the ownership of the rsync process instead of the original owner.

I have a cron job which runs rsync as the user "archiver", and copies files from the "/home" directories onto the backup disk. When I look at the files on the backup disk, I find that the owner and group of these files are all set to "archiver", NOT the original owners.

I am using the rsync "--archive" flag, and also explicitly setting both the "--owner" and "--group" flags (to no effect).

I had to set the backup directory to allow the user "archiver" to be able to write to the directory, so I suspect I've got a permissions problem inherent in my Debian system.

Can anyone suggest a possible solution or area for investigation?

I think it will only work if the root user runs the backup or you sudo the rsync command.

rsync process uid? What is the exact command your using to back these files up to your other computer and the user one computer A, does their uid match the same user on computer B?

I'm using the following command from crontab on the local computer which stores the backup files.

45 02 * * * archiver rsync --archive --backup --suffix="-PreviousCopyFrom-"`date +%Y-%m-%d` --exclude="*PreviousCopyFrom*" --copy-links --max-delete=25 --delete --delete-after --timeout=30 --progress --bwlimit=100 Server1.mydomain.com:/home /data1/Server1/home


the user archiver is common on both computers, and I have exchanged the "authorized keys" files so no passwords have to be exchanged. Obviously, I dont want to pass along authorized keys for the root user on both computers.

Just curious, what did you ultimately do here? Were you ever able to get rsync to run as a non-root user *and* maintain the original owner of the copied files?

Thanks.