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What is a a good way to track over time the amount of data transferred from my ubuntu machine to another host on the internet?

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That greatly depends on how you transfer it. If you have some sort of a VPN, then vnstat can track traffic per interface. These are for example monthly statistics from a VPN I'm using: 

# vnstat -m -i tun0

 tun0  /  monthly

       month        rx      |     tx      |    total    |   avg. rate
    ------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
      Sep '12     26.36 GiB |  894.47 MiB |   27.23 GiB |   88.12 kbit/s
      Oct '12     49.80 GiB |    1.90 GiB |   51.70 GiB |  161.92 kbit/s
      Nov '12     25.93 GiB |    1.20 GiB |   27.12 GiB |   87.78 kbit/s
      Dec '12     27.64 GiB |    1.24 GiB |   28.88 GiB |   90.46 kbit/s
      Jan '13     17.11 GiB |  745.23 MiB |   17.83 GiB |  125.83 kbit/s
    ------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
    estimated     38.54 GiB |    1.64 GiB |   40.17 GiB |
    ------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------

Of course, this is per network interface, not per host. vnstat can be configured to keep a persistent database (flat files).

Another way would be to set up a forward rule in iptables and read iptables traffic statistics (iptables -nv).

But a proper solution would be to use dedicated software with traffic accounting. DrFTPD has a quota plugin.

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  • some of it is http(s) traffic and some of it is imaps traffic. i don't think DrFTP plugin will help in my case :)
    – Saqib Ali
    Feb 2, 2013 at 2:23

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