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Hypnos
Advocate
Joined: 18 Jul 2002
Posts: 2889
Location: Omnipresent
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 Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2002 7:59 pm Post subject: Simple Method For Duplicating Files Remotely |
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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
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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
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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
Veteran
Joined: 27 Jun 2002
Posts: 1311
Location: Munich / Germany
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| Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2002 10:24 pm Post subject: |
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Hi,
if you're inside a local lan, try netcat (nc). It is even faster than rsh. |
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