I think I know what the deal is! The first time I did this I did it with
fsarchiver and  I comp[ressed it with lzma which while compressing better
(and taking longer to do) the decompression is faster. To use lzma the
command would be:

     tar jcf - /dev/sda1 | ssh
fatherewithforeignbabies.us@fatherswithforeignbabies.us 'tar xjf -' | lzma
-z -<compressionlevel>  -
          <filename>

Which would wrap sda1into a compressed tar ball and send the output to the
server where the tar ball would be extracted
and the following output would be compressed with lzma. Do I got that right?

I just found out I can't use the server for storage. So I suppose now the
command would be:

     tar cf - /dev/sda1 | tar xf - | lzma  -z -<compressionlevel> -
/dev/sda2/<filename>

Which would wrap sda1 into a tar ball and feed the output into lzma and
save the results to the second hard drive.
Well, if I'm going to do it that way couldn't I just drop the tar sections?
The result being:

     lzma -z -<compression level> /dev/sda2<filename>

One final advantage with fsarchiver is that it only compresses and
decompresses data. Empty space is ignored. As such the file can be
decompressed onto a partition of differing size than that it was compressed
from. Looking at the manpage fo lzma it doesn't seem to be able to do that.
Does anyone know the resource that might have been used to accomplish this?