Firstly, if the two machines are on the same switch this method is noticeably faster than scp'ing something large. The actual main reason though, is that this i

Firstly, if the two machines are on the same switch this method is noticeably faster than scp'ing something large. The actual main reason though, is that this isn't limited to tarring over a network. What it comes down to, is you can almost seamlessly have a shell pipeline and one of those stages jumps a machine boundary.