One-step tarring/scp (was Re: [ale] hardware to back up a Dell laptop)

[hbbs at comcast.net (Jeff Hubbs)]

Bob Toxen wrote:
> 1. If it supports Ethernet, back up over your LAN.  You could use tar to
>    stdout piped to ssh to cp stdin over the network.
I've been doing this thing where I first tar up a machine's filesystem 
and scp off the file to somewhere.  I'd love to be able to do that in 
one action such that I don't have to write to any disk as an 
intermediate step.  What would that look like?