I setup my partition scheme to have an extra partition the size of my / partion. I have a separate home directory partition. Essentially, I will be doing things that might make my OS unstable so I'd like to backup the OS state but without bothering my home directory. Can I just backup (maybe with dd?) my root partition to another partition on the HDD? I know to restore it I would have to boot up with a livecd or something and do the reverse procedure. I want this to be as simple and require the least amount of external hardware as possible.