Make sure to backup your keys - you can throw them in your Dropbox account, and have them synced, avoiding the situation where you lost access to your main machine, and now you can't SSH into the Raspberry Pi. Conveniently, the user can copy the public key ( id_rsa.pub ) directly to the Raspberry Pi with the help of the ssh-copy command: I recommend testing that you can log in with the key first, before you commit the changes, to prevent the situation where you are locked out from the Raspberry Pi - it’s less of a problem if the machine is next to you, and a whole different class of issues to resolve if the Pi is thousands of miles away.