Well, nc +tar +compression is likely faster. If you compress your SSH connections, scp or piping over SSH is likely much faster for files that aren't tiny, I w

Well, nc +tar +compression is likely faster. If you compress your SSH connections, scp or piping over SSH is likely much faster for files that aren't tiny, I would imagine. You aren't necessarily wrong, but there's a whole world of distinction you're glossing over. Netcat is part of a set of tools you can use to construct a somewhat equivalent tool to scp without encryption, but nc by itself without tar and gzip (or whatever) match only the simplest possibly use case of scp, which is copying one file, without compression, and ignoring all permissions and ownership info. This is also ignoring that you might not even have an open port on one side that the other can reach to have netcat listen on.