Compress an Entire Directory or a Single File

Use the following command to compress an entire directory or a single file on Linux. It’ll also compress every other directory inside a directory you specify–in other words, it works recursively.

tar -czvf name-of-archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory-or-file

Here’s what those switches actually mean:

• -c: Create an archive.
• -z: Compress the archive with gzip.
• -v: Display progress in the terminal while creating the archive, also known as “verbose” mode. The v is always optional in these commands, but it’s helpful.
• -f: Allows you to specify the filename of the archive.

Let’s say you have a directory named “stuff” in the current directory and you want to save it to a file named archive.tar.gz. You’d run the following command:

tar -czvf archive.tar.gz stuff

Or, let’s say there’s a directory at /usr/local/something on the current system and you want to compress it to a file named archive.tar.gz. You’d run the following command:

tar -czvf archive.tar.gz /usr/local/something

The best way is probably rsync.

   Rsync is a fast and extraordinarily versatile  file  copying  tool.   It  can  copy
   locally, to/from another host over any remote shell, or to/from a remote rsync dae‐
   mon.  It offers a large number of options that control every aspect of its behavior
   and  permit  very  flexible  specification of the set of files to be copied.  It is
   famous for its delta-transfer algorithm, which reduces the amount of data sent over
   the network by sending only the differences between the source files and the exist‐
   ing files in the destination.  Rsync is widely used for backups and  mirroring  and
   as an improved copy command for everyday use.

rsync has way too many options. It really is worth reading through them but they are scary at first sight. The ones you care about in this context though are:

    -z, --compress              compress file data during the transfer
        --compress-level=NUM    explicitly set compression level

   -z, --compress
          With this option, rsync compresses the file data as it is sent to the desti‐
          nation machine, which reduces the amount of data being transmitted --  
          something that is useful over a slow connection.

          Note  that this option typically achieves better compression ratios than can
          be achieved by using a compressing remote shell or a  compressing  transport
          because  it takes advantage of the implicit information in the matching data
          blocks that are not explicitly sent over the connection.

So, in your case, you would want something like this:

rsync -z MyBackups user@server:/path/to/backup/

The files would be compressed while in transit and arrive decompressed at the destination.