rsync over SSH preserve ownership only for www-data owned files

Question

I am using rsync to replicate a web folder structure from a local server to a remote server. Both servers are ubuntu linux. I use the following command, and it works well:

Answer 1

Well, you could skip the challenges of rsync altogether, and just do this through a tar tunnel.

sudo tar zcf - /path/to/files | \
  ssh user@remotehost "cd /some/path; sudo tar zxf -"

You'll need to set up your SSH keys as Graham described.

Note that this handles full directory copies, not incremental updates like rsync.

The idea here is that:

• you tar up your directory,
• instead of creating a tar file, you send the tar output to stdout,
• that stdout is piped through an SSH command to a receiving tar on the other host,
• but that receiving tar is run by sudo, so it has privileged write access to set usernames.