Download an entire Amazon EC2 instance to local host using rsync
rsync -av --progress -e 'ssh -i /path/to/user.pem' \
--rsync-path='sudo rsync' --exclude='/dev/' --exclude='/proc/' --exclude='/sys/' \
user@ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:/* /local/path/
Actually, this doesn't download the instance itself, but its file system contents.