Timothy Murphy wrote:
But I was thinking of backing up the whole system, and I discovered that I would have to allow root login with ssh. I know how to do this in the sshd config but would prefer not to do it if possible. Is there a simple way round this?
You can back up to a remote system without root login, but you'll lose all of your files owners and groups. Non-root users can't change file ownership, and can't change group ownership to groups of which they are not a member. Unless you use root or sudo (it's possible), you'll lose that information, which means you won't be able to do a direct system restore from that backup. You'll only be able to restore the contents of select files, mostly configuration and data files.
