dd Directly to Remote Host File

Here's a nifty little trick. Sometimes I run a live disk with no mounted rw filesystem (like a live Linux CD in a Windows computer) or I'm on an embedded platform and I need somewhere to put a rather large dump of an image. Here's how to pipe that image right from dd, optionally through gzip, right to a remote file on another machine over ssh.

dd if=/dev/sdX conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | gzip -c | ssh user@host dd of=image.gz