Das Werkstatt

Tar works fine with pipes, so here's a copy of commandline recipes by Mickaël Bergem:

Execute this on the host that will receive the data from the source server: Tar-gzips the listed folders/files, outputs them to stdout over SSH, which is then received by the local "tar" command which is ungzipping and extracting the received contents in the /backup/destination/folder.

Here's a modified version which skips the (gzip-)compression part (e.g. for LAN): On Mickaël's blog there's also a recipe for pushing (this was pull).