good idea, but with a couple of hitches. dd will make an image of the entire drive, whether it contains music or not. a backup of a nearly empty 30GB empeg will still be 30GB in size (before compression).

also, it locks you into a particular drive size. if you backup your 12GB empeg, and later want to restore on a nifty new 48GB drive, you'll still be left with a 12GB partition map after the restore.

i think a file-by-file approach is the way to go.

--dan.