bzip2 -c largefile.txt | ssh user@hostname "bzip2 -dc > /home/user/myDir/largefile.txt"

Bascially it bzips the file on the fly whilst sending over ssh and decompressing at the other end on the target machine. Very useful for send large files over a vpn or slow connection.

It also saves time by combining all the processes into one.

I know you can use scp -C, but this is faster as it uses bzip.

You can also increase the compression on bzip to make the transfer size smaller, though this will increase processing time however if it's a very slow connection this should not matter.

bzip -c1 will compress at the highest compression ratio