Making an image of my HDD

Hello gurus,

I'm considering doing some dangerous tinkering with my laptop. I have regular backups of /root /boot /etc and /home, but would like to make a complete image of the drive as well. Ideally, what I want to do is boot from a cd, dd the drive to a file on my workstation via ssh in such a way that I can dd it back later if anything goes wrong. But before I risk my precious laptop on this, I wanted to double-check my dd command with you guys:

dd if=${device} conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | ssh -l ${user} ${host} "dd of=file.bin bs=64K"

Any gurus out there can verify whether this is a safe way to do it?

Thanks,

Michael


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