Fedora Servers :: Crontab Backup Job Works / But Gives Chown / Chgrp Errors

As root, I use crontab to run mirrordir to backup directories. Everything gets copied over properly, but owner information isn't preserved and root is the owner of all the backed up files. I can deal with that, but crontab reports tons and tons of chown/chgrp errors for mirrordir every time I do back ups--which is every day--and the multiple emails to root of thousands of chown/chgrp errors is very annoying. The error is "Operation not permitted," but that doesn't make sense to me because the job runs as root (right?) and clearly the job is permitted to create the backup files, so why would it fail to chown and chgrp?

I've had the exact same setup on another server for years, and crontab has always run mirrordir without error. Any suggestions how to clear the errors on my new server?