If your partition is less than 90% full, don't use dd to back it up. dd works at the bit-level, below the filesystem, and will create a file that is the same size of the partition. For example, if you have a 100 MB partition with 1 MB of data on it, then dd will create a file that 100 MB in size ... every time.
Use dar, tar, rsync, or even dump to create the backups, as that will only backup the data, and not the empty space in the partition.
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