Quoting David Laight (david@l8s.co.uk):
> > dump over a network to the new box
> 
> piping tar through rsh and back into tar tend to be fastest for that.

And I'm happy to use tar when I follow up with an rsync
to clean things up.

I like my hardlinks and IIRC, tar doesn't notice them.  Dump does.

As I say, get them over, run an "rsync -avH --delete /part/ remote:/new/part/"
and you'll match them really well.

Also, an AIT or other fast tape may be faster than network :)
pmax machine don't do more than a 10baseT.