Here's the skinny: I have a Linode VPS that I want to backup to my local laptop via rsync. I have just generated ssh keys for the communication and left a blank passphrase for the private key so I can rsync via cron without worrying about passwords.
For extra security I also denied root ssh logins. Ideally I'd like to backup everything from / down but this is simply not possible using a regular user unless I give a specific user rwx access to everything.
What's the best way to backup an entire file system via rsync without allowing root logins?