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Simple Method For Duplicating Files Remotely
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Hypnos
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Joined: 18 Jul 2002
Posts: 2889
Location: Omnipresent

PostPosted: Fri Aug 02, 2002 7:59 pm    Post subject: Simple Method For Duplicating Files Remotely Reply with quote

Hi,

I recently installed Gentoo on my laptop, and wanted to migrate my home directory from my old desktop to the laptop. My desktop does not have a CD burner (and I had 4GB of files anyway), but it does have an ssh server.

So, I set up a two machine network through a hub. I then tried to use scp. In the following example, 'myself' is my username on the desktop, and 'desktop' is the desktop machine's hostname (or IP address if you like):

Code:
root% cd /home
root% time scp -prC myself@desktop:/home/myself .
root% chown -R myself.users myself


Unfortunately, it took forever (over four hours) and turned out horribly. scp has a per-file connection overhead, always dereferences symlinks, and chokes when transferring files whose names have illegal characters.

Then, I tried:

Code:
root% cd /home
root% time ssh myself@desktop 'cd /home; tar -cpz myself' | tar -xzvf -
root% chown -R myself.users myself


Through a 10Mbit hub this process took about 2.5 hours, but everything went perfectly. The ssh command asks for a password, but that did not seem to affect the untarring on the local side.

Certainly, for continuing backups or mirroring one should use rdiff-backup or rsync which does things incrementally. The method here is best for installs or creating data clones; the biggest benefits:

    * There is no setup required for the software apart from having ssh and tar on both ends.

    * There is very little overhead.

    * No disk space or time is wasted on the remote side making a massive tar archive of the target directory.

A simple improvement is to use rsh instead of ssh for a small performance boost (discarding encryption/decryption), but I did not have the rsh server on my desktop, and in my case I was bandwidth limited anyway. Also, one can try not using compression ("-z"), esp. if mostly moving precompressed files, like MP3s or AVIs.

Sorry if this is old hat for many of you, but I thought it might be useful for n00bs (like myself) doing fresh installs.


Hypnos
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meyerm
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Joined: 27 Jun 2002
Posts: 1311
Location: Munich / Germany

PostPosted: Sat Aug 03, 2002 10:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi,

if you're inside a local lan, try netcat (nc). It is even faster than rsh.
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