@denommus Mm'kay. Yeah I'm just used to unpacking/cloning and then running stuff as non-priviliged users because that's what I was raised up to do ;)
One thing you could do, which I do on #quitter.is and #quitter.es for example, is to have different data paths in config.php, like:
$config['avatar']['dir'] = INSTALLDIR . '/../data/avatar/';
$config['attachments']['dir'] = INSTALLDIR . '/../data/file/';
$config['local']['dir'] = INSTALLDIR . '/../data/local/';