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.
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 withpartclone
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.