Backing up Entire Drives with [dd]

If you want to backup a partition use, [partimage]. It is excellent, and will happily achieve the task.

If, on the other hand, you want to backup the whole disk, there does not seem to me to be an OS alternative other than [dd].

To backup the [i]nput [f]ile (because in linux EVERYTHING is a file) [dev]ice [sda] in chunks with a [s]ize of 1 [M]ega[b]yte, [|] piping all data to the [bzip2] program set at the highest encryption setting [-9] to [>] the file [disk_image.301110.img.bz2] on the share [backup/reception] on the cifs server [readynasduo.local] from a live [ubuntu] user's account (having first browsed to the CIFS share, run this command:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda bs=1M | bzip2 -9 >'/home/ubuntu/.gvfs/backup on readynasduo.local/reception/disk_image.301110.img.bz2'