[plug] Fastest way to transfer files over Internet.

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sun, May 11, 2003 at 08:33:05PM +0800, Scott Middleton wrote:
| What would you use?
| 1 to transfer 1x600MB file.

Wget, or rsync depending on the situation.  Maybe scp if you don't care
about resuming if the connection dies half-way through.

| 2 to transfer 600x1MB files.
| 3 to transfer 1200x512k files.

Tar over SSH (see above caveat about not being able to resume though);
tar the files up to a web server and wget them; or rsync.

HTTP is most likely to be able to penetrate quirky firewall set-ups and
such, and is simplest to set up if you're transfering one file to many
machines.  It isn't a good idea if you don't want someone random being
able to grab the files though.

Rsync has huge advantages if you're regularly mirroring files which
don't change much.  It is also secure (rsync in Debian defaults to
tunneling through SSH - dunno about other distributions), easy to use
(at least, once you've done it before), can optionally compress things
on the fly, has a plethora of options and a helpful man page, and is
proudly Australian-made :)

Example of using rsync :
	rsync --delete -zave ssh user at host:/path/to/somewhere/ .
which will log into user at host with ssh and recursively mirror
/path/to/somewhere/* into the current directory.  --delete will tell it
to kill everything in the current directory that isn't on the remote
machine. -z enables compression.

Cameron.