On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 08:19:04AM -0500, Richard Guy Briggs wrote: > I'd be using rsync -vaP so that subsequent updates are faster, but tar zcvf Also add -H, -A, and -X. These aren't just edge cases! > might be faster due to compression... How would compression help when it's on the same host? You can't decompress after the bus. Do you mean to store the data compressed? Sounds more like you just want to use CPIO's passthrough mode. No need to serialize and deserialize data.