So I compressed a large blend file (490MB) tonight using gzip on Linux just to see how much it compressed. Surprisingly it got it down to 189MB. I was kinda curious if Blender could open the blend.gz file directly and to my surprise it opened it just fine. Nice, so you can save some space by compressing your large blend files. The only problem is that when you go to save them, it saves them to the same blend.gz file name, but uncompressed. So you wind up with an uncompressed file named with a compression extension. Oh well.
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Blender actually has an internal gzip compressor/decompressor, so that makes sense:
But I didn’t know it could open them directly from an external compressor. Nice find!
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And I somehow never noticed the compress option there. 
Yes, this is very useful if you have to upload to a render farm.
When you are uploading data somewhere, many command-line tools such as rsync and scp (and of course, corresponding GUI tools) support data-compression during the transfer and may well do it by default. The data pops out the other end apparently unchanged, but the bytes that pass over the network are compressed versions of that data. (The time required to compress and decompress the data is negligible.)
The gzip algorithm, in particular, is a stream (or filter) algorithm that provides “good enough” loss-less compression of almost any data, basically for free. Blender data-files have a lot of redundancy and therefore compress quite well. Images, “not so much.”
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