If you want to do something less tricky and low level than dd just remount the drive in question read-only and use tar. (be root to keep permissions, --use-comp

If you want to do something less tricky and low level than dd just remount the drive in question read-only and use tar. (be root to keep permissions, --use-compress-program=pigz) On the restore side, you can just use pv like cat, and don't have to provide a size param: pv my.img.gz | pigz -d | dd (or hopefully tar xf - instead)... In an ideal world a tool like pv could just look at /proc/fd/fdinfo/ instead of shuffling all the data through itself but I haven't found a tool that clever yet.