Another method worth a benchmark is tunneling tar through ssh.

This will pull the contents of the specified remote directory into the current directory.

  ssh user@foo "cd /dir/to/copy ; tar cf - ." | tar xvfBp -
[download]

I used to run multiple instances of this to get maximum throughput and it works really well. I can't remember exact numbers, but I copied around 60+GB with 10 instances in pretty short order. It performed substantially better than scp. I'm not exactly sure why, but I was figuring it had something to do with the fact that I was copying mailboxes. The 60+GB was made up of hundreds of thousands of individual files averaging a couple of K each.

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naChoZ