[linux] Remote Linux server to remote linux server dir copy. How?

I used rdiffbackup http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/index.html because it does all you need without any fancy options. It's based on the rsync algorithm. If you only need to copy one time, you can later remove the rdiff-backup-data directory on the destination host.

rdiff-backup user1@host1::/source-dir user2@host2::/dest-dir

from the doc:

rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership, modification times, extended attributes, acls, and resource forks.

which is an bonus to the scp -p proposals as the -p option does not preserve all (e.g. rights on directories are set badly)

install on ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install rdiff-backup