Ubuntu :: Rsync Creating Wrong Permissions For Directories?

I try to use rsync for backing up some directories and I have to following problem: some files have permissions that prevent me from running rsync under my own user id. So I run it under root using the option "-a" which according to the man page should preserve the permissions, owner and group information:

However, when I run this under root, the directories created in the backup location get user root and group root while ordinary files keep the original user and group. What am I missing here? How can I get rsync to preserve the user and groups for all files, including directories?

Here is a command to illustrate my problem
Code:
sudo rsync -a /home/youruser /tmp

If you try that and terminate with Ctrl-C after a few seconds, there will be a directory /tmp/youruser where the directories contained within are owned by root group root.