How to rsync with sudo on both sides

When migrating from one server to another, you will likely want to use rsync over SSH to migrate directory trees. It's likely that these trees will not all be owned or even readable by you, meaning sudo is necessary to make the transfer.

It's possible to make rsync use sudo on both ends of the transfer, meaning that in combination with the -a flag, ownership and permissions are maintained even given a mix of file owners & permissions.

To do this, run a command like the following, which transfers /opt/docker from source to destination.example.com. This particular invocation is run on source:

me@source$ sudo rsync -aX \
             -e 'ssh -T -q' \
             --rsync-path='sudo rsync' \
             /opt/docker/ me@destination.example.com:/opt/docker/

With this particular invocation, the remote user will need the ability to run sudo rsync without entering a password. To do this, add a file to /etc/sudoers.d with the following content, replacing me by your Linux username:

me ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/rsync

You can remove this file once you're done transferring files to the new machine..