by Graham Moir.
Ken thank you, this is very useful indeed.
The File System repository is great if you can do the copy yourself on the server, but is also the answer to the question of how to make use of FTP to transfer the files, and so avoid Moodle for the upload step where I'm getting the timeout.
https://docs.moodle.org/29/en/File_system_repository_FAQ may be useful to others alongside the link you have provided.
Thanks also for confirming the compression is there by default in 2.9. Moodle docs probably needs updating to reflect that.