dd is a very handy tool and there are some more practical things we can do.  For example if we want to dump a 3TB drive and want to preserve it and only 200GB are being used on the 3TB we can save a lot of space with gzip.

Backing Stuff up with dd

How to Use dd to backup a raw hard drive and tar gzip at once

• Change /dev/sda to the drive you want to backup
• Change /mnt/extraspace to the path you want to backup to

sudo dd if=/dev/sda bs=20M| gzip -c > /mnt/extraspace/backup.img.gz
 

How to use dd to backup a raw hard drive WITHOUT compression:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/extraspace/backup.img bs=20M

Restoring Stuff with dd

Restoring is just the opposite.

How to restore a raw image with dd with compression:

change the /dev/sdX to the drive you want to restore to (be careful and understand /dev/sdX will be totally wiped out and erased with this operation or at least as much data as the image contains)

gunzip -c /mnt/yourddimage.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sdX

How to restore a raw image with dd WITHOUT compression:

change the /dev/sdX to the drive you want to restore to (be careful and understand /dev/sdX will be totally wiped out and erased with this operation or at least as much data as the image contains)

sudo dd if=/mnt/yourddimage.img of=/dev/sdX bs=10M

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