Another thing to be aware of is that you can copy files out from under a live database. Given that you may have a possibly large database, you could just copy it OOB from your test/production machine to another machine.
Depending on the write load of the machines it may be advisable to trigger a replication after the copy to gather any writes that were in progress when the file was copied. But replication of a few records would still be quicker than replication the entire database.
For reference see: http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/FilesystemBackups