hi-

i backup my mysql databases nightly. i have my webserver setup with a bash script that dumps the database nightly that i found/modified and it runs with a cron job. it works great but the backups are local on the webserver.

i have a linux server at home and i want to have that login to the webserver nightly and download the nightly mysql backup. i'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how to do this and would like some recomendations.

i was looking into trying to write a bash script for my linux server at home to use sftp to login to the webserver and download the backups, but i can't seem to find anything. i'd prefer not to use ftp because because it sends passwords in cleartxt.

i'm pretty new to linux so go easy on me.

thanks for any recomendations / help!

Setup host keys and use either passwordless scp (with host keys) or rsync over ssh. The ssh-keygen man page has a pretty good description of generating host keys. Basically, run ssh-keygen and add the public key it produces for you to the authorized_keys file in your .ssh directory on the server. Then, assuming you haven't protected the key itself with a passphrase (probably OK if you're sure no one else has access to your computer), you can ssh/scp to/from your server without a password. The key is used to authenticate you instead.