Note that if you’re on a slow link, or the server is under heavy load, the tool used for copying won’t be the bottleneck, and any way of copying will be slow anyway.
This should give you the basic usage for copying between your local computer and the remote server: http://oreilly.com/pub/h/38
To copy from local computer to a remote server (you need to replace the paths, user name and host address, of course):
rsync -avz -e ssh /path/on/local/computer [email protected]:/path/on/server
-aarchive-vverbose-zcompress-e ssh«use a SSH tunnel»
To copy in the other direction, switch the paths (first is from, second is to):
rsync -avz -e ssh [email protected]:/path/on/server /path/on/local/computer
But rsync is useful even for copying things around on the same server:
rsync -av /path-to/copy/from /path_to/copy/to