Backing up data to an external server via SSH

I recently needed to back up the contents of a website, but found that a disk quota was preventing me from doing so. What I really needed to do was find a way to compress all the files and, instead of storing the archive locally, pipe the output to another server.

After much Googling and messing about, I ended up with the following command:

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#Uses the tar utility to backup files to an external server

tar zcvf - /path/to/backup | ssh user@server:port dd of="filename.tgz" obs=1024

Of course, this is only practical for a one-off data dump. If regular backups were needed, using rsync would be the best option, as it only transfers incremental changes. An excellent tutorial can be found here.