Is there a way to preserve the owner and group permissions without having root access?
Well, this is not possible on the filesystem level of course, but what about storing the owner/group information in a supplementary file that can be read by rsync to later reconstruct this information? I'm using rsync to perform a server-to-server backup of a machine's hard drive. If the hard drive being backed up were to actually fail, I would want to be able to restore all the files with their exact ownership information. However, I think that needing to have root access on the backup server should not be necessary to do this...
