Piping remote backups through SSH with tar

While usually operating some sort of backup systems, it may become necessary to perform at remote backup of a machine without initiating locally. There can be a number of reasons to do this, such as:

• You do not trust the operator of the machine you need to backup from. Various tools may be compromised to grab your passwords.
• There is no space left on the machine to store the backup file

From the receiving machine (backup to)


# Using bzip2 as compression
ssh user@remote-machine.com "tar cj remote_folder_name1 remote_folder_name2" > backup.tar.bz
# Using gzip as compression
ssh user@remote-machine.com "tar cz remote_folder_name1 remote_folder_name2" > backup.tar.gz


You will be prompted for a password before the command is run. If you need this to be automatic, you can use password-less public key authentication instead (although I will not cover it here). If you risk that your session might die before finishing the copy, try something like 'screen' before running the command.

This shouldn't be much of a revelation to most linux geeks, but useful non the less and written here for documentation purposes.