Mounting a remote filesystem via SSH on Ubuntu Linux

What is the fastest way ever to have available on your computer the contents of the file system of a remote server accessible via a local network or the Internet? Until recently, I personally would have necessarily thought that the only way to solve the problem consisted in creating an archive on the remote server to be able to download and unzip locally, do you know, it is rather costly in terms of time and space on disk and bandwidth needed ...

But apparently I was wrong: it seems there are no limits to the power and flexibility of Linux! I have indeed found that you can solve the problem in a much faster which is "simply" on the mount the remote filesystem as a local directory in a secure ssh, thus not open any window of vulnerability on the remote server.
Here are the steps to take:

• installed packages sshfs and fuse-utils:
  sudo aptitude install fuse-utils sshfs
• sure the kernel module "fuse" is loaded. Lancindo the following command you should get as output a line contentente the word "fuse"
  lsmod | grep fuse
• Do mount the remote file system with a command like the following:
  mkdir -p /mnt/sshfs/
sshfs remote-user@remote-machine:/some/directory /mnt/sshfs
  where "remote-user" is the user that the user authorized to access the remote server "remote-machine"

That's it! Easy no?