>> A better way would be to unmount and send the filesystem with 'dd' or something like that To add to that.. to avoid having to unmount your filesystem; use L

>> A better way would be to unmount and send the filesystem with 'dd' or something like that To add to that.. to avoid having to unmount your filesystem; use LVM. Then you can call `sync`, snapshot your main volume, and `dd` the clean snapshot. Once you're done, remove the snapshot. This strategy avoids downtime while backing up your volume.