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/extras........