remote backup with curl/wget

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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).

Example:

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.

• http://kb.iu.edu/data/agye.html
• http://www.computerhope.com/unix/scp.htm

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