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Clonezilla and Rescuezilla The Clonezilla method takes a bit time to get used to (but I like it). Rescuezilla comes with a GUI.

Ddeez nuts

Ventoy. I love it so much, being able to have more than one bootable iso and storage on a usb.

Although, it is slower to boot the more folders you have, since it scans all folders, but this is configurable

I use nix-shell to get the ventoy cli for when I need to install it to a usb stick.

Just to throw another option out there, partclone will only copy data that is being used in a partition, without all the empty space. I don’t believe it helps for encrypted partitions, but you could always just image the unencrypted filesystem with partclone to a drive with full disk encryption to work around that (and still prevent storing data unencrypted). Saves a lot of space.

Also, in the context of backups, I often prefer to use btrfs send to create and update backups through snapshots quickly and efficiently instead of imaging (though of course that requires you to use btrfs). Full imaging is pretty inefficient for my needs, and takes a lot of time.

pv. It’s just cat, with a progress meter.

Definitely ddrescue. Unlike traditional dd, it can deal with failing drives, it’s operation is resumable, and has some other features that’s helpful. I would recommend using it even if your drive is fine.
What it produces is a byte for byte copy just like dd.

cp

I use FSArchiver. There’s nice list on Archwiki.