scp a partition to another server

I am in the process of migrating a server to another machine.

Without much thought, i just copied one partition to the other server using, simple scp in at job which ended up in mess.

scp -r /mnt/sda6/* root@IP:/mnt/sda9/

At first sight, it seemed correct. So i did this, for all the partitions which i want to copy.

And today, once after the weekend, when all the huge partitions are copied to here, when i investigate the directories, the partitions got filled up without really copying all the files. And found that, the links are copied, that is where as only the link is supposed to be copied, the original file also copied.

I am worried about what else went wrongly ?

So here is my question, how to exactly copy a partition to another server ?

Note: I actually seen the following, and it did not want to take risk something like this ? ( is this is a risk or good way to copy ? )

bzip2 -c /dev/sda1 | netcat hostA 2222

netcat -p 2222 -l |bzip2 -d | dd of=/dev/sdb3

I sincerely appreciate any help on this.

Its a "classic"...
I havent yet tried a variant to use in ssh mode (since you were using scp...) or style, perhaps you will give me a good solution (while Im busy at other things... but I know it will be handy for me beginning next year...)
I till now used for such purpose (copying filsystem content from on host to another) 2 things:
1)the use of .rhosts file
2) tar
command on source host:
go the the source directory and type

tar -cf - * | remsh <remotehost> "(cd <dest_dir>;tar -xvf -)"