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  • I stated some of the rsync options myself in the original question, having used them during local backups (to another partition/disk on the same system). But are UIDs, GIDs, ACLs and so on preserved when backing up via SSH to another box entirely, one that may not have the groups or users the original machine does? Architecturally the answer seems to be "no" so I asked, what's a better option (one that will work on more than just Ubuntu, and with ext3, ext4, xfs, etc.)? Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 9:10
  • A filesystem doesn't care about the system's user database. All it cares about is user ids. So with --numeric-id, there is no problem sending data to another machine, it doesn't matter whether there are users with those uids or not. Same for ACLs (which are actually stored as extended attributes). The only issues that you may find is when the target FS doesn't support the same feature set as the source one (like POSIX ACLs for ZFS) Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 9:48
  • You can also try the --fake-super option on the remote rsync. Example from the manpage: rsync -av --rsync-path="rsync --fake-super" /src/ host:/dest/ Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 14:36
  • I'll look into this option, and will run some tests to see what happens on the target (and during a restore). Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 17:40