Trying to send a tar over ssh but its being decompressed when sent

Question

Im trying to tar a directory and send it over ssh to another server, but I want it to be sent with tar format not decompressed as the following script does

tar -czf - Documents | ssh user@server tar -xzf - -C server_backup_directory/

Answer 1

No, that's not what the script does. It archives and compresses the directory; sends it over in .tar.gz format; then decompresses it once it's already on the destination server.

So if you don't want the last part to happen, just change the decompression command tar -x into something which doesn't decompress, usually cat:

tar -czf - Documents | ssh user@server "cat > Documents.tar.gz"

(Be sure to use quotes so that the entire command, including > redirection, is run on the server.)

Answer 2

Use scp instead.

The command you are running will decompress the file as you're explicitly telling it to do.

An example of scp would be:

tar -czf Documents.tar Documents/ && scp Documents.tar user@server:. && rm -f Documents.tar