Hard Drive Smart Failure recover Ubuntu if its externalized?

[d0ntp4n1c]

Hi all thanks for taking the time to look. Seeing as how the Ubuntu community is so great at answering questions and providing support i figured i would give you guys a try. My problem is that my hard drive is dieing and unable to do a proper backup with it running in the system I. was wondering if there was a way to create a backup image from a externalized hard drive and put it onto the new hard drive that i just installed. I have searched for a good hour or so and cant seem to come across a similar problem. please help!

[d0ntp4n1c]

from what i have been reading it seems that a ubuntu backup is just a copy of all the folders in the root directory. Can anyone confirm that if i copy the root of my old hard drive to the root of the new one and merge/replace it will work? saying its gonna take 10 hours and would like to know before i waste even more time.