I suppose that as one of those who voted to close it, there is some onus on me to respond.
Firstly, you should be aware that one criterion for closure is that the answer to your question is the answer to an existing question. The questions don't have to be the same, as long as the answer is a good fit.
I accept that, in this case, the answer isn't a good fit, because you're already doing it - but you didn't tell us that in your question. Yes, we could have elicited that by careful questioning in the comments, but the etiquette here is that the author of the question does the legwork, when writing the question, to show us what research has been done so far, what's already been considered, why it was inapplicable or how it didn't work, and so on.
I also note that you seem to have answered your own question: if you have a list of local files you want copied to a remote system, with no reference to any existing copies of the files on that remote system, then I, too, think tar is what you need. If you don't agree, clarifying why that's not the solution would also be necessary, because at the moment your question has a strong whiff of the XY problem about it.
If you edit your question to bring it up to these standards, I for one would vote to reopen it.