One of our customer found it tedious to sync his live websites to his dev servers, it involved using FTP (since he had no version control) as well as the database.
The files were over 2GB by themselves, so it could be a time consuming task. As a result he asked us for a solution, and we were able to provide the following script to help him out.

Put the following into a script (eg sync.sh ), then chmod +x sync.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Add your ssh key to the remote server before running this
# Where are the local files going to be saved
LOCALDIR=~/local/dev/www/

# No trailing / please on this one below
REMOTEDIR=/var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.co.nz/httpdocs

# Remote MySQL connection details
REMOTE_SQL_USER=databaseusername
REMOTE_SQL_PASS=JGOIDBp4553gh
REMOTE_SQL_DB=databasename

# Local MySQL connection details
LOCAL_SQL_USER=databaseusername
LOCAL_SQL_PASS=JGOIDBp4553gh
LOCAL_SQL_DB=databasename

# Remote host IP
REMOTE_HOST=49.50.242.255
REMOTE_USER=root

ssh ${REMOTE_USER}@${REMOTE_HOST} "mysqldump -u${REMOTE_SQL_USER} -p${REMOTE_SQL_PASS} ${REMOTE_SQL_DB} >/tmp/${REMOTE_SQL_DB}.sql"

rsync -avP ${REMOTE_USER}@${REMOTE_HOST}:$REMOTEDIR/* ${LOCALDIR}

rsync -avP ${REMOTE_USER}@${REMOTE_HOST}:/tmp/${REMOTE_SQL_DB}.sql /tmp/
mysql -u${LOCAL_SQL_USER} -p${LOCAL_SQL_PASS} ${LOCAL_SQL_DB} < /tmp/${REMOTE_SQL_DB}.sql

Edit the script as needed to reflect the database/files/etc you want, then run ./sync.sh

To make this really seamless, use ssh keys to login. If you want to have this on a cron, make sure you put the full path to the rsync and mysql, or any other binaries used.