rsync is available on most linux and unix distributions. rsync has the ability to throttle the amount of bandwidth that it uses to transfer data. This can be done using the –bwlimit option.
An example of the rsync command with the bandwidth limit parameter is:
rsync -a --bwlimit=10240 /folder/to/copy user@somehost:/new/folder/location
The bwlimit parameter sets the limit in terms of kilobytes. In the command above it is throttled to 10MB/sec. This is very useful for preventing network saturation.