backup or mirror a repository

Hello list,

I have been poking around on IRC and gmane, but haven't yet seen a solution to my problem:

What I really want is something semantically identical to a recursive copy of my entire git repository on one machine sent to another machine. Right now I can't simply use "rsync -ar --delete ..." because the pack changes names, thus fooling rsync and sending a bunch of bits over the network.

I saw git-mirror on gmane and asked around in IRC, but the former seems to have died sometime last November and the latter told me I'd probably have to write some glue to process git show-ref and git ls-remote. This seems viable, but suboptimal. Another user chimed in that they also had the same use case as myself.

fdr

(Justifications: I am super paranoid, so I want to push my local branches to another disk to be safe, but then they proliferate over time since deleted local branches are not also deleted on the target repository. I also want to work on multiple machines seamlessly, and as such doing a bunch of "git checkout -r ..." when I need to change branches is also suboptimal. As I said, I can get what I want by simply using rsync, so this is entirely about efficiency by exploiting git's structure)