Script wanted to backup my Windows partiton

[Mr Doolie]

Seeing as Puppy can boot up and see my Winpoop drives as data drives it seems a natural to use as an imaging backup utility. I don't speak Linux so forgive me if the following is rubbish.

I know that the "dd" command will make and restore an image, right? dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/sda1/mybackup should create an image of everthing including the MBR and stuff but it will be a 160Gig file and there is only about 20 Gigs of actual stuff on there.

1) Is there a way to do a "dd" that will only get the used sectors?

2) Can it be piped (is that the right word?) though gzip or something to create many say 2 Gig compressed files rather that one HUGE one? Is there a way to activate a display so I can see what's going on during the process?

3) Am I reinventing the wheel here? Maybe something already exists to do this.

Thanks


A Linux Dummy

[hillside]

You may want to look in the Utility menu and check out the PBackup program that's there. I haven't used it yet, but it looks like it may meet your needs.

[alienjeff]

An excellent read: http://tinyurl.com/2uef4c

Caveat emptor: expect an occasional syntax or variable SNAFU with some of the examples due to Puppy's use of Busybox