[sf-lug] debian vs ubuntu question

[Alex Kleider]

On 2019-02-15 22:46, Rick Moen wrote:

> Here's what you do:  Get yourself whatever live Linux distro you're
> comfortable with.  (Whatever you like.) Get yourself a nice large USB
> external drive at least as capacious as your Linux partition (I assume
> there's only one) on your Linux laptop.  Once you have your laptop 
> back,
> boot the live distro (from optical disk or flash drive).  Plug in the
> external USB drive.  Figure out what device nodes the laptop hard drive
> and the external USB drive are.  Use 'dd' to do a bitwise copy of
> the laptop hard drive to the external USB drive.  You're done.
> You now have a pristine safety copy, verbatim (stored on ice) of your
> laptop's entire contents.  I'm skipping over details, but a LUG meeting
> can help you.  (To do it with whooshing graphical programs instead of 
> dd,
> use something like Clonezilla Live.)

Assuming (once the live distro is booted) that one can be certain that 
the computer's
hard drive is /dev/sdb
and the 'nice large USB external drive' is /dev/sdc
(and further assuming if any of their partitions are auto mounted that 
they all be first 'umounted')
would the correct 'dd' command be:
   dd if='/dev/sdb' of='/dev/sdc'
?

Or should one leave /dev/sdc1 mounted (on /mnt/bu/ for example)  and use 
the following:
   dd if='/dev/sdb' of='/mnt/bu/my-virgin.img'

Or something else??

Alex