Rsync friendly gzip

my gzip (on ubuntu and fedora) has the --rsyncable option. So create the tarballs using:

tar -c whatever/ | gzip --rsyncable > file.tar.gz

BeezNest has a pretty good explanation of the rsyncable option for gzip. In the author's test, this option added about 1% to the file size, but made it possible for rsync to transfer the updates to a gzipped file with over 1,300 times speedup.

For the gory details, see this discussion, which they cite.

I like this one because I wanted to tar.gz it, not just .gz

GZIP='--rsyncable' tar cvzf bobsbackup.tar.gz /home/bob