rsync and compression

[lewis Eklund butler]

I have a directory that I backup using rsync with --link-dest and hard  
links, but I would like the files in that directory to be zipped to  
conserve space.  They are very large log text files (hundreds of megs)  
that compress 90% or more.

Is there some way to do this so that all the files rsync backs up get  
compressed?

The only thing I can think of is manually compressing the directories  
after rsync runs, but that seems like quite a waste or time and  
resources.