How to move data by ssh and tar Sometimes you have a lot of files to transport and you don't want or can't make archive files. So the solution could be to transport our files by first make a tar archive of it and than scp it to the other site. The first one is from the destination server to ssh to the source server ssh user@server "tar czpf - /data" | tar xzpf - -C /new/data The second example is from the source server to the destination. This example is a little bit more like the dataflow. tar cpf - /data | ssh user@server "tar xpf - -C /new/data/"