Tar is not a compression algorithm, it is a format for serializing files, so it covers a different use-space. I've used it often to speed up transfers of many

Tar is not a compression algorithm, it is a format for serializing files, so it covers a different use-space. I've used it often to speed up transfers of many small files over SSH - scp always took a small amount of time before sending each file, and with many files, the wasted time blew up. Serializing all those files with tar and deserializing them on the other side turned out to be much faster, especially since tar works in a stream-like fashion. And it's convenient to type, too: tar -c path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ... | ssh user@host tar -x