Indeed. This is one of my favorite idioms for untarring a remote file locally: ssh remote_host cat archive.tar.gz | pv | tar zx Unless the contents are ver

Indeed. This is one of my favorite idioms for untarring a remote file locally: ssh remote_host cat archive.tar.gz | pv | tar zx Unless the contents are very large, that's almost always faster than rsyncing the remote directory locally, because both ends just stream. No coordinated start and stop for each little file. There is one big advantage of the zip file format: you can extract a single member without having to read the whole archive. It's usually just two seeks: seek to end, read TOC; seek to position, read member.