I am not very confident I am doing this right and it seems wrong, I can't locate any documentation that results into proper options. I tried backing up an 8gb USB that has 2 partitions in it, one had 1.7gb of data on it. I used dd if=/dev/sdb of=usbfilename.iso The resulting image was the full size of the disk. To test the validity I restored reversing the order of the filenames if/of but that took for ever and it was a hog on resources. After a while I just gave up and killed the process. I looked at the disk and it seemed complete with all files in tact, so maybe I killed it somewhere in the verification process. So I used a program called etcher which I have used with 100% success in the past and was surprisingly fast in burning images. It took for ever as well, eventually it run a verification routine and it was done. Is there someway one can avoid creating such a large iso for no reason, when the filesize is a fraction of the whole disk. One way I thought of was to shrink the partitions to just about 99% full, and leave the blank part of the disk as not allocated. Would that help? Is there some fancy command line that does just that?
Thank you in advance -- "The most violent element in society is ignorance" rEG