How To Copy Files With Rsync Over SSH

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How To Copy Files With Rsync Over SSH

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-copy-files-with-rsync-over-ssh

Linux Basics
By Bulat Khamitov

Last Validated on January 19, 2021 Originally Published on March 29, 2013 994.1 kviews

Install rsync

sudo apt-get install rsync

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 AAAAB3Nza-big-long-string root@email.com

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/

# my changes
rsync -avz -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null" --progress /home/tmc/.ssh/id_ed25519 CloudPod:/root/.ssh/

rsync -avz -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null" --progress /home/tmc/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub CloudPod:/root/.ssh/

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!