Does it makes sense to backup the whole partition as opposed to their files?

Posted by maaartinus on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by maaartinus
Published on 2011-02-28T23:19:51Z Indexed on 2011/03/01 7:32 UTC
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partitioning

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backup

I know that on Windows it's quite futile to try to backup the "C:" partition file-wise and that's why a full partition backup is needed. Is it OK to backup a the root Linux partition file-wise? Are there any downsides?

Clarification

Here, I don't care about advantages of partial backups. I'm going to do additional separate backups of /home, etc. What I'm interested in here is the comparison of

backup of all files from /
vs. backup of the whole partition as device

What are the advantages of something like dd if=/dev/sda1 ...?

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