I work a lot with remote servers (as any developer working with production).
Sometimes, I want to download a file from the remote server to my local box, this includes log files, maybe some mysql backup or generally any other file.
I can’t copy the file to an HTTP accessible location and download since all of the servers are behind a load balancer and it will probably get to a 404.
To copy a file from a remote server to my local box I use this
scp {username}@{server_address}:{file_location} .
Sometimes your server requires a key file
scp -i {key_file_location} {username}@{server_address}:{file_location} .
For the times when you need something quick, just to download a log file and continue with it, this works out great.
