How do I SCP from remote machine to local machine when I am outside of my home network?

While I understand how to scp files to and from my server from within my home network, how can I scp a file from my server to my local machine when I am on the outside, say at Starbucks?

While I am able to scp from my local machine to my server in this scenario, I haven't figured out how to grab a file from home, using the command line. Any suggestions?

user98496

Posted 2011-09-20T13:31:17.197

Reputation: 683

Answers

The way the question is asked is pretty confusing, but if you can copy from your local machine to the server, to go the other way just flip the command line order.

its scp [from] [to]

scp user@homeip:/path/to/file /local/path/

Sirex

Posted 2011-09-20T13:31:17.197

Reputation: 10 321

Nobody seems to mention which computer to execute this command on – braks – 2016-01-06T00:04:34.653

Thanks, I'll give it a try and confirm if it worked for me. – user98496 – 2011-09-20T14:10:25.590

1I think the question is more about setting up dyndns and port forwarding...he just didn't know what to ask. – RobotHumans – 2011-09-20T14:22:42.793

1True, I probably don't know what to ask. I'm still learning. If you could offer further explanation about what ports I need to forward (and any info I'll need regarding dyndns) in order to achieve my goal, I'd appreciate it:-) – user98496 – 2011-09-20T15:31:33.897

Suggestion in first response did not work. Normally, when I type: "scp -r somedir me@123.45.6.7:/home/me/Desktop" it works fine. However, If I try this from a public WIFI connection at say, Starbucks (and not at home), it doesn't work. What am I doing wrong? – user98496 – 2011-09-20T18:59:42.573

oh right. ok that's a different issue. You need to allow access to ssh from outside your network. This is done by forwarding a port on the your broadband router to the lan ip of your server. However there's some security concerns with allowing ssh access from outside, so you may also want to look into methods to secure ssh, particually key-based authentication and disable password authentication entirely. – Sirex – 2011-09-21T07:51:02.750

I must be missing something here because I am already able to ssh into my server from the outside...never a problem. I just can't scp files from the server when I login from outside. Sorry if I seem confused, but well...I am. – user98496 – 2011-09-23T01:24:35.497

6SOLVED: The command that works for me is: scp remoteusername@host:fileiwanttocopy /my/local/comp – user98496 – 2011-10-19T18:28:52.153

Copy the file "foobar.txt" from a remote host to the local host:

$ scp your_username@remotehost.edu:foobar.txt /some/local/directory

Copy the file "foobar.txt" from the local host to a remote host:

$ scp foobar.txt your_username@remotehost.edu:/some/remote/directory

Copy the directory "foo" from the local host to a remote host's directory "bar":

$ scp -r foo your_username@remotehost.edu:/some/remote/directory/bar

Copy the file "foobar.txt" from remote host "rh1.edu" to remote host "rh2.edu":

$ scp your_username@rh1.edu:/some/remote/directory/foobar.txt your_username@rh2.edu:/some/remote/directory/

Copying the files "foo.txt" and "bar.txt" from the local host to your home directory on the remote host:

$ scp foo.txt bar.txt your_username@remotehost.edu:~

Copy the file "foobar.txt" from the local host to a remote host using port 2264:

$ scp -P 2264 foobar.txt your_username@remotehost.edu:/some/remote/directory

Copy multiple files from the remote host to your current directory on the local host:

$ scp your_username@remotehost.edu:/some/remote/directory/\{a,b,c\} .

$ scp your_username@remotehost.edu:~/\{foo.txt,bar.txt\} .

For More Information: Secure Copy

azeemigi

Posted 2011-09-20T13:31:17.197

Reputation: 481

And all this requires that you have sshd running - everybody knows that, eh... or not. – Hannu – 2017-12-15T17:15:49.790

If you wanted to secure copy to a remote location such as Dropbox or GoogleDrive then create an account with https://couchdrop.io then link your storage provider.

From there simply,

scp <filename> couchdrop-username@couchdrop.io:/Dropbox etc, if you then want to pull a file from the cloud then just reverse the two statements so;

scp couchdrop-usernmae@couchdrop.io:/Dropbox/filename ~/ - this will pull the file down to your chosen directory

Jayden

Posted 2011-09-20T13:31:17.197

Reputation: 1