Say I have my OS exactly how I want it on a dedicated system partition (All other important important data is kept on seperate drives).

How possible (Read practical) is it to make a DD clone of the partition and store it on a backup drive as a .img until required.

If required... simply DD it back on to a clean partition of the same size and have it boot up as normal (After a bootloader reinstall).

But will DDing it back on return a functional OS?

Thank you.

This is completely feasible, but there are some cautions:

First, don't attempt to clone the partition that you are working from. The easy solution is to boot from liveCD and run "dd" from there.

Make sure that you store the image file somewhere that has enough space. Running from the live CD, you first have to mount the partition where you want to store the image.

If you clone just the partition, the bootloader will stay in the MBR. It will point to the partition ONLY if you restore it to the same partition number on the disk. Otherwise, you would need to change /boot/grub/menu.lst to point to the right place.

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Hi there! Thanks a lot!

I would use a live CD and back up first to a local drive and then transfer it to network storage (Plenty space).
The bootloader thing was more if the HD fails and I have to transfer the image back.

Is this the best way to do it or is it a sledgehammer to crack a nut?

This is not a direct answer but--I would personally not bother with backing up a complete installation----just data.

The OS gets zapped---> Reinstall

In my case, I seem to change or upgrade systems faster than they fail---YMMV

I like to dd my /dev/hda6 (complete debian lenny amd64 install with all my downloaded deb's 1.1GB in var/cache/apt/archives, screen and session settings etc.) to a usb /dev/sdb3 partition of the same 10.6GB size (76% used) and it takes under 17 minutes using bs=2048 and conv=notrunc,noerror on a weekly basis - and if I screw something up or install something I don't want, it takes the same amount of time to rewrite it back and everything is working even my wireless (broadcom 4306 using ndiswrapper and netbc564.inf drivers) so that I can get back online almost immediately.

Hope this helps

I don't like dd as an archiver - you never know if you have problems with the backup, and has no flexibility re size and filesystem type to restore to. I use it occasionally if I think I may break a (test) system, and want a quick backup.
I recently heard about fsarchiver. Appeals more to me as it's f/s aware, and does some CRC checking - is on my list of things to try out.