Rsync is a fast and extraordinarily versatile file copying tool. It can copy locally, to/from another host over any remote shell, or to/from a remote rsync daemon.
It offers a large number of options that control every aspect of its behavior and permit very flexible specification of the set of files to be copied.
It is famous for its delta-transfer algorithm, which reduces the amount of data sent over the network by sending only the differences between the source files and the existing files in the destination.
Rsync is widely used for backups and mirroring and as an improved copy command for everyday use. rsync has way too many options. It really is worth reading through them but they are scary at first sight. The ones you care about in this context though are:
-z, --compress compress file data during the transfer --compress-level=NUM explicitly set compression level -z, --compress With this option, rsync compresses the file data as it is sent to the desti‐ nation machine, which reduces the amount of data being transmitted -- something that is useful over a slow connection. Note that this option typically achieves better compression ratios than can be achieved by using a compressing remote shell or a compressing transport because it takes advantage of the implicit information in the matching data blocks that are not explicitly sent over the connection. So, in your case, you would want something like this:
rsync -z MyBackups user@server:/path/to/backup/
The files would be compressed while in transit and arrive decompressed at the destination.