On Sun, 30 Dec 2001, Kevin Easton wrote: > > Is there a way to preserve the owner and group permissions without having > > root access? > > You can do this by creating a tar archive of your filesystem (NOT > compressed though), and rsync that across to the backup machine. > Then you'll just have to be root when you extract the tar archive to > recreate the ownership/ permissions. As long as you don't use > compression, you'll still get the rsync speedup.
My previous backup solution actually uses tar, but there's two problems that I have with it: 1. My backup file, even when compressed with .bz2, exceeds 2 GB by a little. The backup machine has an older kernel that doesn't support >2 GB files and upgrading it is not an option because this is a dedicated server. 2. tar archives are a pain to work with if I just want to go in and find one specific file that I need to recover; it takes a long time to extract a file. Giving the situation some more thought, it might not be hard to be able to use rsync to preserve file ownership without having root access. It would be just a matter of getting a "ls -lR" of the data, and having some program that can parse that to recover the original file ownership if necessary. Has anyone already done something like this by any chance?
