If you have sshd enabled on your desktop and that is what you are wanting to back up to, I suggest rsync. It is very fast and can run over ssh. It also, once you get the initial sync set up, will only copy over changed files...which makes it much faster later on.
A simple example would then be:
Code:
rsync -avz /data/tmp user@foo:src/bar
This will do a verbose(v) archival(a) sync with compression (z) from /data/tmp to the host foo with user's credentials.
There are plenty of how to pages out there regarding rsync. I love it!