Which reminds me - use ddrescue instead.  That will copy everything, skipping bad blocks.

From: PLUG-discuss [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Bob Elzer
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2017 11:00 AM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: (OT) Backup Software Suggestions

Plus dd would copy all the unused sectors on the disk

On Jan 27, 2017 10:00 AM, "Matt Graham" <mhgraham@crow202.org> wrote:

On 2017-01-26 17:05, Eric Oyen wrote:

why not just use dd and a sufficiently large backup device connected
directly to the machine? [...] Basically, I just image the entire
device. It's easier to restore that way.

dd is usually not a good way to back things up because of speed.  "dd if=/dev/mapper/vg-home of=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-123456 bs=1M" would take 90 minutes every time it ran because it's transferring 300ishG.  "rsync -av --delete-after /home/ /mnt/backup1/home/" usually takes 2-5 minutes because it's only transferring the files that have changed, which is usually 150-500M or so.

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