I’ve been moving files between Linux servers, and to and from Windows boxes, as part of my server migration. I started to write about how I’ve been doing it, but it seemed oddly familiar.
Yep, I’ve written about SCP and its Windows port, PSCP, before. Do this long enough and you find yourself repeating yourself.
Sure, you could set up an FTP server, or install Samba, but it’s good security practice to have as little running as possible on a server, especially one whose primary job is to accept Internet traffic. SSH is something you need on the server anyway, for remote administration, so using SCP doesn’t compromise its security posture at all. And if you isolate the server behind its own dedicated firewall/router, SCP still allows you to move files back and forth to it, without opening any additional ports.
One point of clarification from the original piece: Using the -c switch to turn on compression won’t help when sending files that are already compressed, like png or jpg graphics. But when moving, say, 36-megabyte SQL dump files, it helps a good deal.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.