I've become a huge fan lately of using "--info=progress --no-inc-recursive" for rsync. It can result in more memory usage, since it builds the file list ahead of time rather than dynamically, but it provides you with an overall progress report of the entire transfer, rather than per-file progress reports which may be much less useful.

Aaaah I was so happy to switch until I see "The source and destination cannot both be remote."

This gets my vote for nicest alias in the thread.