Posted on by Ferg

Backup using tar over SSH

I’ve now got a fairly large (0.5Tb) external drive. A Lacie. Now it’s a RAID 0 pair of 250Gb drives, which is not exactly a reliable backup medium. But I like it and since it’s firewire 800, it’s pretty dammed fast. Anyway, I normally backup to tape, which is good although slow. I just tried backing my Linux Home directory (~150Gb) to the external drive via SSH to my macbook. Where the drive is plugged in. Nice, fast and pretty cool.

tar -czvf - /home/ | ssh ferg@morcheeba "cat >> /Volumes/Backup/Homebackup16Mar07.tar"

Cool. eh!

2 Replies to “Backup using tar over SSH”

  1. Cool – sounds like a useful tip. I need to get a bigger drive for my macbook. About $170 for a 100Gb 7200rpm drive.

    You need to add an RSS icon to your sidebar for easy subscription too 🙂

  2. I keep meaning to add RSS, but never got around to it.. I’ll have a go this week….!

    You never noticed the mistake in the command above. I never could get OSX to extract the compressed tar file used above, so I had to create non compressed ones instead.

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