Typically when copying from one machine to another, I've had the best results by far with tar | tar, but I'm not sure how well that would fare with tons of hard

Typically when copying from one machine to another, I've had the best results by far with tar | tar, but I'm not sure how well that would fare with tons of hard links like this. I think it's possible, but the default behavior would just gobble up umpteen copies of the same file.