Making an image of my HDD

["Michael S. Peek" <peek@tiem.utk.edu>]

Hello gurus,

I'm considering doing some dangerous tinkering with my laptop.  I have 
regular backups of /root /boot /etc and /home, but would like to make a 
complete image of the drive as well.  Ideally, what I want to do is boot 
from a cd, dd the drive to a file on my workstation via ssh in such a 
way that I can dd it back later if anything goes wrong.  But before I 
risk my precious laptop on this, I wanted to double-check my dd command 
with you guys:

dd if=${device} conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | ssh -l ${user} ${host} "dd 
of=file.bin bs=64K"

Any gurus out there can verify whether this is a safe way to do it?

Thanks,

Michael