I use this rsync invocation to backup my home directory:
rsync -aARrx --info= --force --delete --info=progress2 -F "$USER_HOME" "$BACKUP_MNTPOINT"
rsync man page says that -a implies -g and -o (among other switches), which should preserve ownership. However I've noticed that if a directory does not exist under $BACKUP_MNTPOINT/$USER_HOME
, it is created with root:root ownership instead of the correct one. (This only happens with directories right under $BACKUP_MNTPOINT/$USER_HOME
). Why is that?
$BACKUP_MNTPOINT
is a localy mounted drive. $BACKUP_MNTPOINT/$USER_HOME
does have the right ownership and permissions. Neither $USER_HOME
nor $BACKUP_MNTPOINT
end with a slash.
Both the source and the target filesystems are XFS and running mkdir $BACKUP_MNTPOINT/$USER_HOME
creates a directory with the expected ownership.
Best Answer
I had a similar problem when using
rsync
to backup my system to my server. I used:The solution is that there is not really a problem. I suspect that you aborted the
rsync
process once you saw that it creates folders with wrong permissions set. The crux is thatrsync
only sets the permissions of a parent-folder once it is done syncing all subfolders and files of it.