… compression tool ? The classical tool used for backup compression is gzip – it exists almost everywhere, it is stable and relatively fast… means if your goal is faster local network transfer default GZIP compression will not speed things up on the standard point… using dedicated server for backups. I should also note for mysqldump backup typically tools with better and slower compression make sense…

If you want the best possible compression ratio go with mysqldump + bzip. I can squeeze a 130gb database into about 6… 8 core server). I get almost 50% better compression of mysqldump files with bzip2smp and it runs twice as fast as gzip.