So you need to backup a remote unix system but don’t have enough free disk space to tar locally and then tranfer? Try this!<\/p>\n
ssh username@hostname.tld “tar -zcvf – \/ –exclude \/proc –exclude \/dev ” | cat > my-system-backup.tgz<\/p>\n
This is a breakdown of what this does: <\/p>\n
– Starts an ssh session with your remote system (hostname.tld)
\n– Executes tar -zcvf – \/ –exclude \/proc –exclude \/dev ( the exclude statements ensure we don’t grab bits we don’t want, \/proc for sure)
\n– Since tar has – as the filename it pipes the output to the shell, which in turn is piped into cat
\n– The > redirects the output into a filename of your choice, the .tgz indicated Gzip’d tar file, you can name it whatever you like but .tgz is a standard.<\/p>\n
The above command will backup the entire system but you can specify any path, a simple . will backup all your home dir contents on the remote system. I have found this handy on several occasions when I needed a quick and dirty backup of some files on a remote host. Backups to the remote hosts local disk aren’t much good if the system goes down! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So you need to backup a remote unix system but don’t have enough free disk space to tar locally and then tranfer? Try this! ssh username@hostname.tld “tar -zcvf – \/ –exclude \/proc –exclude \/dev ” | cat > my-system-backup.tgz This is a breakdown of what this does: – Starts an ssh session with your remote … <\/p>\n