Move a Discourse site to another VPS with rsync

Hello,

I’m in the middle of trying this process on an older Discourse instance I’m now responsible for maintaining – migrating off an EOL Ubuntu to something fresher because any upgrade fails if I try it in place – and although the rsync was successful, postgres is failing to launch citing file ownership issues. Running the rsync as root with the ownership-preservation options didn’t correct this (file ownership and permissions do now match the source, I checked), and because bootstrap has failed and I have no running container, I can’t attempt to fix this like Update failed (postgresql) - #7 by noezDE describes.

What’s the best way to normalize whatever postgres is expecting?