what are the simplest ways to get a few GBs of data from ec2 linux instance?

Question

I have a linux instance with several GBs of data. What are simple ways of getting the data out to my local machine?

I wonder about S3, Cloudfront, scp, ftp, http etc. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I'd say scp, closely followed by rsync. But if you have many small files (average below few dozen KiB) tarring it over ssh may be faster.