Every so often I need to backup an entire machine, I'm usually lazy too and I prefer to rsync the data between machines so I can restart the process if it fails to complete for whatever reason. The following is what I use to backup or migrate machines

PROMPT> rsync -arvpz --numeric-ids --exclude dev --exclude proc --exclude tmp --exclude sys \
-e "ssh -l root@source" root@source:/. /data/backup_target/.

I could have used tar and piped the data over ssh to another host as well, but I didn't.