Depending on your available bandwidth, cpu etc. you may want to compress / uncompress inline. I just tried this locally: sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 | bzip2 | pv | b

Depending on your available bandwidth, cpu etc. you may want to compress / uncompress inline. I just tried this locally: sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 | bzip2 | pv | bunzip2 | dd of=/tmp/tmp 204800+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 23.1976 s, 4.5 MB/s 84.6MB 0:00:27 [3.02MB/s] 204800+0 records in 204800+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 28.0081 s, 3.7 MB/s