A great way to copy a large directory of files while away from home…

I wanted a copy of my svnsync’d version of the SVN repo while at PyCon. It’s about 450MB (and it’s not up-to-date currently)… but it has quite a few files. In 20 minutes time, it only got about 60MB of data across the wire. I killed it and ran:

ssh host "tar jcvf -C /path/to/parent - dir" | tar jxvf -

and it was done in roughly 25 minutes. Nice.