This seems like a nice way to backup for a catastrphic failure, grabbing partition tables and all. But if one is using LVM, and most seem to be, set your disk up to use snapshots and just automate the entire backup process in cron to a hot usb drive. Swap the drive out once a week and you are done. You can even setup for incrementals and what not. This seems like a better solution than depending on discipline and rebooting. »