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    Can you provide specifics of how you're "pulling" files? What utilities are you using, and can you provide any sample showing this effect? Commented Sep 10, 2015 at 13:22
  • I am not sure if this will be a more complete answer, but consider this scenario: Suppose you have two computers, foo and bar, and you want to copy data from foo to bar. (1) You log into foo, then remote mount the drive which is physically attached to bar. Then you copy from foo's disk onto the remotely-mounted directory (which is physically on bar). I called this pushing the data to the other computer. (2) Compare this to the other way of copying the same data. Log into bar, remote-mount the directory attached to foo, and read from foo onto bar's drive. This is pulling. Commented Sep 10, 2015 at 17:42
  • This copying can be done with the Linux cp command, from a a GUI file manager, or any other way of copying files. I think pulling turns out to be faster because writing is slower than reading, and more of the decisions on how to write to the destination disk are being done on the same computer the drive is attached to, so there is less overhead. But maybe this is no longer the case with more modern systems. Commented Sep 10, 2015 at 17:45