Synchronize a directory over sftp

Sundar Nagarajan sundar.personal at gmail.com
Tue Jan 8 08:13:41 UTC 2008


Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 17:00 +0100, Lea Gris wrote:
> 
>> If no rsync is available at the remote host you can do it old school:
>>
>> tar --create --bzip2 --sparse --file - ~ | ssh user at remotehost "(cd
>> /destination/directory tar --extract --bzip2 --file -)"
> 
> Yep, assuming SSH is enabled on the remote server for the user account.

I believe SFTP uses SSH, and without SSH being enabled on the remote 
server, the OP wouldn't be able to use SFTP either. There may be ways of 
disabling interactive login using SSH while permitting SFTP, but 
technically, the (open)ssh layer is being used.

Regarding the OP's question, I would agree that rsync is a natural 
option. If the remote system does not permit rsync, an indirect 
workaround would be to use sshfs 
(http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html) which uses FUSE (should be 
standard with recent Ubuntu versions) on the client. Then, once the 
remote system ahs been mounted using sshfs, you can again use rsync.






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