I would like to perform incremental backups (for the entire filesystem) from a machine. rsync
does this quite will, however I would like to also preserve file ownership - meaning, make it possible to restore it.
Is this possible to do without running rsync
as root on the target machine (storing the backups)?
Some ideas...
- Is there a way to mount a filesystem (FUSE?) in such a way as to allow
chown
for a non-root user? (I guess it would probably need to benoexec
to forbid elevation.) - Some way to store and restore the ownership in metadata files instead of the filesystem itself?
tar
can store file ownership, though getting it to work with rsync or incremental backups would be a bit more involved. It would also be nice to be able to browse the backups like a regular filesystem.- Perhaps some kind of fake root environment? A virtual machine would work, but would be nice to avoid the associated maintenance and performance overhead.