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I need to backup a clients server (source) from our mediatemple server (destination) and then add it into a git repository while ssh'd in.

What is the most efficient/fastest way to do so? wget? or curl?

I only need to do this once. I'm not looking to setup rsync.

Update: I forgot to mention i only have ftp access to the clients server and shell access to our mediatemple server.

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Unsecure transfer: Use wget. wget is faster than curl. The reason for this is wget fires off multiple requests in parallel.

Secure transfer: Use scp as described by Brendan. wget and curl use SSL encryption for secure transfer. SSL is generally slower than using a SSH Tunnel, which is what scp uses.

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You could use 'scp' and run it from your source machine and connect to the remote machine+directory you want the information saved to. It's probably the easiest and requires the least setup (scp is most likely already install on your *nix distro).


scp SourceFile user@host:directory/TargetFile

Here are some additional sites with different examples and a breakdown of the arguments that can be passed to scp.

Lastly, you can type: man scp on the command line to pull up the manual page for scp

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I don't have ssh to the clients server just our mediatemple server. Don't you need ssh access to scp? –  chrisjlee May 25 '11 at 15:24

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