I know that you said rsync was banned, but just to be on the safe side:

If by banned you mean that you can't have rsyncd running, you should know that you can actually use ssh to run client rsync between two boxes without ever needing to start rsyncd. I've used this before when I was told by some architect that the "r" commands were not allowed. In spite of telling him that rsync only had the letter 'r' in common with rsh/rexec/rhost they weren't buying it. So I used an ssh call to establish the rsync connection. Worked like a champ. I can post a script if you need it.