virtualbox, backup, redundant system problem... need advice!

One question about using rsync. I followed the howto https://www.howtoforge.com/mirroring_with_rsync. I created the user the rsa keys so I don't need the password. My problem is when I want to rsync /var/www I get
rsync: opendir "/var/www/clients/client2/web1/web" failed: Permission denied (13)
errors for all my sites.
The command I'm using is rsync -azq --delete --exclude=**/stats --exclude=**/error --exclude=**/tmp --log-file=/var/log/rsync.log -e "ssh -i /root/rsync/mirror-rsync-key" [email protected]:/var/www/ /var/www/

Do I need to skip the user creation and create the cert for root and run as root and not syncuser?

 

yes I'm logged in as root.
The clients folder has 755 permissions. Does it need 777?

 

OK... I think the syncuser does not have read permissions for the /var/www/ folder becouse it's root:root as default and the howto only coverd creating the user. So I added syncuser to root with adduser syncuser root. But I still get the same error.
getent group root
root:x:0:syncuser

 

#24 didn't work. I edited vi /etc/sudoers and added syncuser ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/rsync. Now if I use command
rsync -azq -e "ssh" --rsync-path="sudo rsync" [email protected]:/var/www/ /var/www/ it syncs files but it asks for password.
trying to combine the rsa key -rsync-path option throws an error. I probbably wrote it wrong
rsync -azq --rsync-path="sudo rsync" -e "ssh -i /root/rsync/mirror-rsync-key" [email protected]:/var/www/ /var/www/.

Any idea how to write the command for crontab so it works without password? Do I need to reload the /etc/sudoers for the changes to take affect... if yes how?