I think rsync pretty much provides all you need in one tiny command-line to get data from A to B.

But if you want to increase your resilience against failing network connectivity, and make sure you don't delete anything that hasn't been properly copied to your server, I suggest you take a look at datamover: http://www.cisd.ethz.ch/software/Data_Mover

Essentially, it's a daemon written in Java that monitors an outgoing directory. Everythings that is written in there gets safely copied over to a central storage drive. Behind the scenes, they use rsync to do the copying, but it's wrapped in tons of features that improve the reliability of the moving process, like a quiet period before a file gets moved (good for applications that write their output incrementally and sporadically into files), multiple retries on network time-outs, high-water marks, data transformation (e.g. compression) during the move process, etc. It also is very anal about sending you emails for anything that could possibly be a data integrity problem.

We rely on it to store the raw data from scientific experiments. With the proper configuration, your holiday pictures should be just fine.

Thanks to the TPA (Travel Promotion Act), there's really No Problem(TM). In addition to all the border troubles, simply charge the poor guy visiting another $10, which can then be spent on promoting tourism.

What a brilliant idea: An entrance fee to the US... just like a theme park.