there are several ways to accomplish what you want to do, rsync has very helpful documentation, I'd suggest reading the manpages for it however, here are a few quick solutions rsync -av will preserve all permissions on the destination machine, and you will need to make sure when transferring this back to use the same switch if you are backing up entire file systems and are special files you need to use the linkdest option so the files get transferred properly additionally you can also backup remote file systems nfs smb etc, using rsync but be careful about using permissions based transfers with this data because sometimes particularly with windows based smb mounts, the rsync is unable to preserve owner. Jack At 01:34 AM 9/28/2004, you wrote: >If rsync is used to backup data for multiple users, on to a system whereon >the recipient for the files, is a single user, rsync will, of course, set >the user and group of all files, to the recipient user. > >If dealing with a large number of users, it is less than ideal, to create >all of the users on the target backup server. > >Is there any way to do such backups, in the rsync method, while still >preserving ownership data, but without creating all of the users involved? >Some sort of meta ownership data. > >If not, what might be another method of doing this? > >_______________________________________________ >Speakup mailing list >Speakup at braille.uwo.ca >http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup