You can make a backup of your pi and have the backup written to your regular PC all from the command line.
From your local machine, run the remote backup command:
ssh pi@xx.x.x.xx "sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M | gzip -" | dd of=/path/to/pibackup.gz
After 47min 21sec, in my case, got this as output:
30436+1 records in
30436+1 records out
31914983424 bytes (32 GB, 30 GiB) copied, 2830.89 s, 11.3 MB/s
4637363+1 records in
4637363+1 records out
2374329939 bytes (2,4 GB, 2,2 GiB) copied, 2841,61 s, 836 kB/s
If you ever need to use your back up you cannot do it remotely (at least that I know of).
You will need to insert the SD card into your local machine and run the following commands:
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk#
gzip -dc /path/to/pibackup.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/rdisk# bs=1m conv=noerror,sync