'rsync compression and how it works

I am using rsync to backup a large amount of files (on a Ubuntu Linux server) to a cloud network service over WebDav. Because my network speed is my bottle-necking factor, I thought I would use rsync -z (compression) to decrease the file size and hopefully this would lessen the bottleneck.

Anyway, while researching the purpose and use of rsync with compression I don't seem to find an answer to exactly what it is doing.

Basically it seems that rsync compresses the data, transfers it, then decompresses the data. However, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that rsync decompresses the data after it has been sent to the cloud as that would require the cloud service to decompress the data, which i don't think is happening.

My question is, is does rsync with compressing actually compress and decompress data that is sent over WebDav or FTP or some other network to network protocol? and if it does not help me, then in what scenario would the compression flag help me, local to local sync over USB 2.0 for example?

linuxubuntunetworkingrsync


Solution 1:[1]

rsync since version 3.2.0 supports more than zlib:

--compress, -z
       turn on compression
--compress-choice=STR, --zc=STR
       choose compression from lz4 (fastest), zstd, zlibx, zlib (slowest), none
--compress-level=NUM, --zl=NUM
       zlib and zstd can be tuned with compression level
       zlib from 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest), default 6
       zstd from -131072 to 22, default 3

Sources

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Solution Source
Solution 1

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