Compress a Mysqldump that is SSH'd to another machine

Question

I have the following:

 mysqldump -u xxxx 
           -h localhost 
           --password=xxxxx databasename | 
           ssh [email protected] "dd of=httpdocs/backup`date +'%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S'`.sql"

...which SSH's a mysqldump to a remote machine.

I need to compress the mysqldump before it is SSH'd as the dump is 500mb and its eating up my bandwidth allowance.

Answer 1

mysqldump ... | gzip -9 | ssh ...

or

mysqldump ... | bzip2 -9 | ssh ...

or, if you want it uncompressed on the other end

mysqldump ... | bzip2 -9 | ssh machine "bzip2 -d >..."

mysqldump ... | gzip -9 | ssh machine "gzip -d >..."

Answer 2

You can add the -C flag to the ssh call to automatically compress the transmitted data.