On receiving machine:
nc -l -p 2999 | dd of=empeg_drive_0
On empeg side:
dd if=/dev/hda | nc receiving_hostname 2999
Roger & others, would this be OK?

It would work, but it (a) requires a filesystem on the receiving machine that can cope with gigantic files (ie. NTFS or Linux), (b) backs up the whole drive including unused space, and (c) only lets you restore to a drive of identical size.

Much better is to back up the music partition using tar, a la Roger, and only back up the fixed-size partitions (root and dynamic data) using dd. Of course, the swap partition and the spare partition needn't be backed up at all (unless you've done something funky with the spare partition).

Peter