Home » Categories » Multiple Categories

How To Copy Files With Rsync Over SSH

Step 1 - Setup public SSH keys

On our origin server, we will generate public SSH keys with no password:
ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -q -P ""
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
This is our public SSH key that can be placed on other hosts to give us access:
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDLVDBIpdpfePg/a6h8au1HTKPPrg8wuTrjdh0QFVPpTI4KHctf6/FGg1NOgM++hrDlbrDVStKn/b3Mu65//tuvY5SG9sR4vrINCSQF++a+YRTGU6Sn4ltKpyj3usHERvBndtFXoDxsYKRCtPfgm1BGTBpoSl2A7lrwnmVSg+u11FOa1xSZ393aaBFDSeX8GlJf1SojWYIAbE25Xe3z5L232vZ5acC2PJkvKctzvUttJCP91gbNe5FSwDolE44diYbNYqEtvq2Jt8x45YzgFSVKf6ffnPwnUDwhtvc2f317TKx9l2Eq4aWqXTOMiPFA5ZRM/CF0IJCqeXG6s+qVfRjB root@cloudads
Copy this key to your clipboard and login to your destination server.

Place this SSH key into your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file:

If your SSH folder does not exist, create it manually:
mkdir ~/.ssh
chmod 0700 ~/.ssh
touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 0644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Step 3 - Rsync files over

Rsync is a great utility, as it allows you, among many other things, to copy files recursively with compression, and over an encrypted channel.

We will copy a file from our origin server (198.211.117.101) in /root/bigfile.txt over to our destination server (IP: 198.211.117.129) and save it in /root/bigfile.txt as well.

Login on 198.211.117.101 and rsync the file over to 198.211.117.129:
rsync -avz -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null" --progress /root/bigfile.txt 198.211.117.129:/root/
If you are using a different user, for example "username" then you would have to append it in front of destination server. Make sure to have your public key in that user's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file:
rsync -avz -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null" --progress /root/bigfile.txt username@198.211.117.129:/
The SSH options are useful to keep Rsync quiet and not prompting everytime you connect to a new server.

Verify that you have received the file on destination server (198.211.117.129):
ls -la /root/bigfile.txt
And you are all done!
Attachments Attachments
There are no attachments for this article.
Related Articles RSS Feed
How To Install Node.js with NVM (Node Version Manager) on Server
Viewed 4000 times since Sun, Dec 29, 2013
How To Use HAProxy to Set Up MySQL Load Balancing
Viewed 8322 times since Thu, Dec 26, 2013
How To Use Traceroute and MTR to Diagnose Network Issues
Viewed 6853 times since Fri, Dec 27, 2013
A Basic MySQL Tutorial
Viewed 2487 times since Thu, Dec 26, 2013
How To Setup a Rails 4 App With Apache and Passenger on CentOS 6
Viewed 3787 times since Thu, Dec 19, 2013
How To Launch Your Site on a New Ubuntu 12.04 Server with LAMP, SFTP, and DNS
Viewed 2778 times since Thu, Dec 26, 2013
How To Use Top, Netstat, Du, & Other Tools to Monitor Server Resources
Viewed 6969 times since Sat, Jan 4, 2014
How To Set Up MySQL Master-Master Replication
Viewed 3026 times since Thu, Dec 26, 2013
How To Set Up vsftpd on CentOS 6
Viewed 2334 times since Thu, Dec 26, 2013