Is there any way for a non-root account to set file ownership for other users? This would come in handy for backing up to remote systems where you don't want to enable remote root access.

I don't see how... except for maybe sudo?

I tried sudo - it works.
I was able to create a file as say user1 and change the owner to user2.

If you create a directory then you should have the permission to change it's ownership, if someone else creates the directory then they have the permission, only root should really have permission to change other people's directories. So I'd stick with the above on the sudo one, you could look into group permissions however, directories don't always have to be limited to a single user. So if you need a directory to belong to a group you could assign a set of people to belong to the same group and then they should all be able to use it, alternatively if you want permissions over folders created by root you could add yourself to the same group as root if you have sudo or root but if you have them then you might as well just set yourself up with sudo as that's safer anyway.

what i'm trying to do is preserve ownership during backups

Can't you give the users permission to run the backup program with root privileges using sudo?

The cp command, the rsynch command, and the tar command all have options to preserve ownership. See:

man cp

man tar

man rsynch

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Steve Stites

These commands need to be run as root to preserve ownership.

I'd really like to create a dedicated backup user to oversee the backing up of other users' data.

So basically, with sudo, you would just give the privileges to that specific user then.