Work. Software development is so much nicer on Linux and I grew to really enjoy the power and flexibility of the terminal. I started with dual boot on my PC and eventually deleted my Windows partition and went full Linux.

Many things have substantially improved significantly in the last 10 or so years such as gaming, drivers and overall desktop user experience to the point where I dread trying to use a Windows machine. Plus I’m pretty comfy now and like that I have full control over my machine when I use Linux vs whatever spyware MS is trying to shove down people’s throats.

I’ve done something like that before with ddrescue though the example on the Arch wiki ddrescue page shows how to copy an entire drive to another drive. Here’s how to backup to a file instead:

sudo ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda1 /path/to/backup.hdimage /path/to/backup.mapfile

But I’d reference the docs just to double-check: https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html

You might need to restore the image via Arch recovery mode with a bootable USB drive loaded with the Arch ISO however.

The Arch wiki has some really good info on using dd for cloning. I’ve done it myself successfully with dd, but double and triple check to make sure your command is correct before continuing. Both drives would need to be connected to the same machine at the same time (new drive in a USB enclosure or in a spare PCIe slot)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dd#Disk_cloning_and_restore

It might be worthwhile to check out GUI alternatives to dd if you feel more comfortable in a GUI vs terminal:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Disk_cloning