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:

rsync -az /var/www/ [email protected]:/var/www/

The usernames for the local system and the remote system are different. From what I have read it may not be possible to preserve all file and folder owners and groups. That is OK, but I would like to preserve owners and groups just for the www-data user, which does exist on both servers.

Is this possible? If so, how would I go about doing that?

** EDIT **

There is some mention of rsync being able to preserve ownership and groups on remote file syncs here: http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2005-August/013203.html

** EDIT 2 **

I ended up getting the desired affect thanks to many of the helpful comments and answers here. Assuming the IP of the source machine is 10.1.1.2 and the IP of the destination machine is 10.1.1.1. I can use this line from the destination machine:

sudo rsync -az [email protected]:/var/www/ /var/www/

This preserves the ownership and groups of the files that have a common user name, like www-data. Note that using rsync without sudo does not preserve these permissions.

Answer 1

You can also sudo the rsync on the target host by using the --rsync-path option:

# rsync -av --rsync-path="sudo rsync" /path/to/files user@targethost:/path

This lets you authenticate as user on targethost, but still get privileged write permission through sudo. You'll have to modify your sudoers file on the target host to avoid sudo's request for your password. man sudoers or run sudo visudo for instructions and samples.

You mention that you'd like to retain the ownership of files owned by www-data, but not other files. If this is really true, then you may be out of luck unless you implement chown or a second run of rsync to update permissions. There is no way to tell rsync to preserve ownership for just one user.

That said, you should read about rsync's --files-from option.

rsync -av /path/to/files user@targethost:/path
find /path/to/files -user www-data -print | \
  rsync -av --files-from=- --rsync-path="sudo rsync" /path/to/files user@targethost:/path

I haven't tested this, so I'm not sure exactly how piping find's output into --files-from=- will work. You'll undoubtedly need to experiment.