Why haven't I used secure copy 'scp' before? My god.. it makes life so easy when moving files between unix servers on the internet.

I must be a slow learner. I've known about it for ages, but never bothered to use it. From the man page:

scp copies files between hosts on a network. It uses ssh(1) for data
transfer, and uses the same authentication and provides the same security
as ssh(1). Unlike rcp(1), scp will ask for passwords or passphrases if
they are needed for authentication.

Any file name may contain a host and user specification to indicate that
the file is to be copied to/from that host. Copies between two remote
hosts are permitted.