Networks

A SSH Key allows you to log into a remote server without ever having to enter the password for you user on that server. In some situations, you can use this to increase security, by configuring the remote host to only allow SSH to be used when the client has a key. It can also be useful when the remote host does not have a password, such as when using Dropbear on initramfs. Or, if you need to be able to set up a cron job that can log onto a remote host, you could setup a passwordless key (although there are inherent risks to doing so) and use that to allow the log on.

I keep most of my files on my server because I've around a terabyte of space available. In order to access directories that I regularly need, I use NFS to share out the drives.