[doosra]

scp -C does the same thing. Both methods use gzip for compression.

[rarrrrrr]

But the tar method will generally be 5-15x faster for large collections of small files.

Handing it with tar makes operations on both ends asynchronous. scp (or rsync, etc.) of multiple files does file opens on each end in lockstep, resulting in a lot of idle wait time.