The nccopy has options to specify what kind of output to generate and optionally what level of compression to use.
nccopy [-k output_kind] [-d level] [-s] [-u] [-m bufsiz] input output [-k output_kind] kind of output netCDF file omitted => same as input '1' or 'classic' => classic file format '2' or '64-bit-offset' => 64-bit offset format '3' or 'netCDF-4' => netcdf-4 format '4' or 'netCDF-4 classic model' => netCDF-4 classic model [-d level] deflation level, from 1 (faster but lower compression) to 9 (slower but more compression) [-s] shuffling option, sometimes improves compression [-u] convert unlimited dimensions to fixed size in output [-m bufsiz] memory buffer size (default 5 Mbytes) input name of input file or OPeNDAP URL output name of output file