Quote Originally Posted by Ace_NoOne View Post
I need to resize the existing partitions, and want to make sure I have a full, easy-to-restore backup in case something goes wrong.
You want partimage or mondo-rescue ... "dd" is not the solution here IMHO, because it is only capable of making 1:1 binary copies. In other words: If you use "dd" to copy a 50 GB partition then this copy will use exactly 50 GB of space somewhere ... and besides: It takes a really long time to copy so many GB's around.

As I wrote above ... I'd suggest e.g. partimage:
http://www.partimage.org

Or mondo-rescue:
http://www.mondorescue.org/