Neat way to FTP backup

Here’s what I do to backup my Debian box to a FTP server without temporarily occupying local disk space:

tar cf - --exclude '/var/cache' --exclude '/var/lib/apt' --exclude '/var/lib/dpkg' --exclude '/var/tmp' /etc /root /home /var /usr/lib/cgi-bin /usr/local/sbin | bzip2 | curl -n -T - ftp://ftp.server.com/backup.tar.bz2