Hi, Wondering if someone can help me out with this one: I want to make disk images of a server and store them somewhere remote. Ofcourse you can do this with dd and upload the file with sftp to a remote server. The downside is that it requires a huge amount of free space to store the temporary disk image file. Is there a way to "stream" it directly to a sftp-server? As far as I came up with was this: dd if=/dev/sda | bzip2 > /backup/disk.img | sftp -b /backup/dd.txt -oIdentityFile=/backup/sshkey.key [email protected] contents of dd.txt: -cd remotebackup put /backup/disk.img quit In this case it will store the disk.img locally first and then send it. So I was wondering if there was an easier way to this and stream it directly. (Note: The remote SFTP-server is a Windows-machine, so no linux shell commands can be executed) Thanks in forward for any help. Best regards, Quentin
Am not sure if sftp can accept stdin but it is worth trying Code: dd if=/dev/sda | bzip2 > /backup/disk.img | sftp user@host:file -
Won't work Thanks for your reply, but with the last command you wrote it still will write to a local disk, which results in a huge "temp" file... Still couldn't find a solution, but thanks for thinking along with me in this case. Best regards, Quentin
The OpenSSH scp/sftp commands refuse to transfer non-regular files, so you can not use a named pipe. However, there are other scp/sftp implementations. Maybe one of them will do what you want.
Ok Ok thanks for your replies. In short: It just can't be done this way... Does anyone know another program which can do the trick? I just want to image the disk on the fly to a remote server. If any other backupsoftware can do something similar, it's ok too. Best regards, Quentin
