It's pretty necessary if you aren't moving between colocated boxes. "less than a couple hundred GB of data" is still a lot of data to be moving around, even on a 100Mb/s link, which almost no one in America has residentially, and isn't even a guarantee for colo'd machines.
In most cases, compression at the raw block level will result in HUGE size savings, especially since a lot of that may be free space. It might even make this transfer tenable.
In most cases, compression at the raw block level will result in HUGE size savings, especially since a lot of that may be free space. It might even make this transfer tenable.