The standard tool for taking a disk image is 'dd.' Man page: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/dd.1.html
Theoretically, you can simply image the entire drive, partitions and all intact exactly as they are presently, although I've never done it that way... I have always imaged partitions directly... But I don't see why either method would be "wrong," as long as you know how to mount the output ;) As for compressing it... https://serverfault.com/questions/52260/compressing-dd-backup-on-the-fly suggests you can simply pipe the output of 'dd' directly into gzip... But one of the comments says not to use it for the purposes the original poster suggested it for, so maybe read their warnings before following their advice. On Fri, Jan 4, 2019, 06:08 Richard Owlett <[email protected] wrote: > I wish to do fresh Debian installs to three machines {including > repartitioning drives of each machine}. Each drive is nominally 250GB. I > have purchased a USB connected 1TB drive to be the target. > > I like the ease of use of Clonezilla-live. But it intrinsically wipes > the target drive completely. Compressing the output would be nice. > > TIA > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
