You are currently making a separate system call to run scp for each file that needs to be copied. This is inefficient because of the overhead of starting up a new process and the overhead of initiating a new connection to the remote machine. If you are running this every minute, and if the script takes more than a minute to run, you will also have multiple instances of the script running simultaneously.

Rsync, as mentioned above, would be a much better option. If you are primarily copying html files, you may want to also turn on compression (-z option). 

/usr/bin/rsync -az -e ssh source_directory/ \
  user@backupserver:destination_directory

-e ssh tells rsync to use ssh for transport
-a is archive mode, which gives recursion and preserves permissions an
+d such. -ar would be harmlessly redundant.
-v will show filenames during the transfer.

[download]
The trailing slash on the source directory is important. See man rsync for more info.

In reply to Re: scp cronjob by mp
in thread scp cronjob by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.