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.
Last fall, after my one year old Macbook battery died and Apple refused to fix it I decided to spend twice as much as a replacement battery to buy myself a new Asus EEE 1000he netbook instead.