Neo4j Enterprise edition ships with a feature to take consistent backups while the database is up and running. Using config option dbms.backup.address you can expose the port to the outside.
However that port should not be exposed to public networks for two reasons. First the backup is transferred unencrypted and second no authentication is used. On online backups should only be used inside a trusted environment.
In couple of cases I wanted to grab a backup on a remote server and the only way to accessing it is via ssh. Nothing easier than this, see the following one-liner (be sure to scroll horizontally):
ssh <user>@<server> 'TARGET=`mktemp -d`; (neo4j-backup -from localhost -to $TARGET &> /dev/null); tar -zcf - -C $TARGET .; rm -rf $TARGET' > graph.db.tar.gz
First we create a temporary directory to be used as target for the backup. On most systems this is created under /tmp, so be sure to have enough available space there.
It’s important to mute the call to neo4j-backup in order to not pollute the transferred archive with textual report output of neo4j-backup – therefore we redirect stdout and stderr to /dev/null.
Next step is transferring the target directory as gzipped tar archive over the wire and store it locally. As last step the temporary directory gets deleted.