Question

Is there an alternative to scp, to transfer a large file from one machine to another machine by opening parallel connections and also able to pause and resume the download.

Please don’t transfer this to severfault.com. I am not a system administrator. I am a developer trying to transfer past database dumps between backup hosts and servers.

Thank you

Answer 1

You could try using split(1) to break the file apart and then scp the pieces in parallel. The file could then be combined into a single file on the destination machine with ‘cat’.

# on local host
split -b 1M large.file large.file. # split into 1MiB chunks
for f in large.file.*; do scp $f remote_host: & done

# on remote host
cat large.file.* > large.file