rsync -a not preserving file ownership or group I'm rsyncing from a remote linux box to my local solid state hard drive on my mac running High Sierra. I'm using the -a switch (archive) which is supposed to preserve the ownership of the group but the files are saved with my owner and group, not the ones on the remote server. Using disk utility, I see Owners is set to enabled.

I seem to remember being able to do this and the files would be saved with the UID and GID numbers.

Is this still possible?
I encountered the same problem and found a solution that worked for me. I created a Sparse Image called Backup. On a hard drive directory, file ownership was preserved during the rsync backup but not on the backup image.
1. Ownership of the Destination
I noticed that the ownership of the backup image was the current user (me) and I changed to something like that:
drwxrwx---@ 13 root    staff   510B 12 jul 10:59 Backup

2. Run rsync as sudo
And on the Linux host I modified the command to run rsync as sudo.
rsync -avh --rsync-path=&quot;sudo rsync&quot; ...

And for the macOS backup host accept to execute rsync as sudo without password:
sudo visudo
# and add this line
# replace username with your current user name.
username ALL= NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/rsync

I also added these flags to the command but I cannot say that this would help to resolve the current problem:
/usr/bin/rsync -avzh  --sparse --super --numeric-ids --relative --rsync-path=&quot;sudo rsync&quot; ...

Hope this help.