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Copy files between two machines over SSH

Updated 2026-07-05

Problem: You need to copy a file or directory from one machine to another, and both machines have SSH access to each other but nothing more elaborate set up.

Solution:

scp report.pdf deb1:/home/user/backups/

How it works:

  • scp copies over the same SSH connection you'd use to log in, so it needs no separate server or setup beyond working SSH access.
  • deb1:/home/user/backups/ is host:path; the trailing slash means "into this directory," keeping the original filename.
  • Reverse the arguments to copy in the other direction: scp deb1:/path/to/file.txt . pulls a file from the remote host to the current directory.

Variations:

# Copy an entire directory tree
scp -r project/ deb1:/home/user/

# rsync: only transfers what's actually changed
rsync -avz project/ deb1:/home/user/project/
sending incremental file list
a.txt

sent 190 bytes  received 36 bytes  452.00 bytes/sec
total size is 23  speedup is 0.10

rsync -avz (-a archive mode, preserving permissions and timestamps; -v verbose; -z compress in transit) is worth reaching for over scp for anything beyond a one-off file: run the same command again after an interruption or a partial sync, and it only transfers files that are new or changed, rather than starting the whole copy over. A second real difference that matters for large trees: scp reads the whole source list into memory before it starts, while rsync streams it, so it copes better with directories containing very large numbers of files.

The trailing slash on the source path (project/ vs project) matters for both tools: with the slash, the contents of project/ land directly in the destination directory; without it, the project directory itself is created as a subdirectory of the destination.