Attempting to backup to a remote file system

[Bluefish001]

Attempting to create a backup script to copy files from one file system to a remote file system.

When I try this I get:

# tar -cf - /mnt/raid_md1 | gzip -c | ssh -i ~/.ssh/key -l user@192.168.1.1 "cat > /mnt/backup/fileserver.md1.tar.gz"
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.
ssh: Could not resolve hostname cat > /mnt/backup/fileserver.md1.tar.gz: Name or service not known

When I add -t -t I get this:

# tar -cf - /mnt/raid_md1 | gzip -c | ssh -t -t -i ~/.ssh/key -l user@192.168.1.1 "cat > /mnt/backup/fileserver.md1.tar.gz"
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
ssh: Could not resolve hostname cat > /mnt/backup/fileserver.md1.tar.gz: Name or service not known

Not sure what I am missing... I know that the remote file system dir is RW and the access is working fine. I am stumped.... hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

[forkbomb]

This is what you're after? Try to lose the -l switch (I think that's extraneous if you're doing user@hostname or user@ipaddr). I'd also drop the pipe over to gzip and do it with a switch straight to tar, though that shouldn't make a difference.

tar zcvf - /mnt/raid_md1 | ssh user@192.168.1.1 -i ~/.ssh/key "cat > /mnt/backup/fileserver.md1.tar.gz"

One other option you could look into is to mount the remote system as an sshfs using fuse (at which time the local machine will treat the remote share as if it were a local file system). This is dated but a good start: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8904

[Bluefish001]

That did the job thank you:
Can you detail the syntax so I have a clearer understanding of what is going on.... really confused about the use of cat in ""

[SiliconSlick]

The use of '-' (hyphen), tells tar to write the tar output file (f option to tar) to standard output. That is piped (|) to cat (via SSH) which reads that standard output as its standard input and dumps the result to /mnt/backup/... via redirection (>) of its standard output.

SS