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note: all = all that i've found

all the "cloning with dd" information talks about how dd copies all the "empty space", but literally all writings seem to be responding to a situation where filesystems fill up the entire disk.

what about the situation where i have two partitions that together fill up only 10% of 160G disk. what is the image size going to be for the good ol "dd if=/dev/sda of=disk.img" run: 16G or 160G?

unless i'm blind, Using DD for disk cloning does not have this information.

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sda is the disk as a whole - 160 GB

sda1 is the first partition on that disk - 8 GB (say)

sda2 is the second partition on that disk - 8 GB (say)

If you only want to clone the 16 GB of filesystem data, use dd on sda1 and sda2.

To restore the data to a different disk you'd have to first partition that disk (ideally identically to the original disk). I expect you'd probably have to reinstall the bootloader too.

See, for example, http://www.backuphowto.info/linux-backup-hard-disk-clone-dd

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yeah, if the goal is to have minimum whole-disk image size with a single dd command, you are saying there is no difference to dd whether empty space resides inside filesystem or in non-partitioned space. right? – lkraav Nov 6 '10 at 16:55
dd can't tell the difference between "empty space" and space filled with data. You can minimize the image size by compressing it with gzip but obviously this takes time. I suppose you could minimise the size of a gzipped dd of sda by creating a new partition to occupy the remaining disk space and filling that partition with zeroes or some regular pattern. However I doubt there are many cases where this would be worthwhile. – RedGrittyBrick Nov 6 '10 at 17:04
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