I've used dd many many times with great success in cloning drives.
If you are just cloning one disk to another to migrate to a new hard disk, dd is fine. If you are looking at it for more diverse backup or cloning solution. You should look elsewhere as you cannot really depend on dd to create valid backups as it doesn't support any sort of error checking, metadata, or even compression or anything like that.
At least if you are just cloning one drive to the other, you immediately end up validating the cloning as entire purpose was to boot up on a second disk. That cannot be said if you're using it for a backup or large cloning solution.
We don't bother with imaging software for Puppy Linux. Come to that, we don't even bother with 'dd'.
Due to Puppy's 'frugal' install nature via the use of compressed, read-only files, a simple copy/paste operation will usually suffice...believe it or not!
With Windows, because of the way it's put together, I believe imaging software is the only way you CAN do it.
Free bare metal restore solution with graphical interface on a live CD. Point-and-click to backup and restore an entire computer. Bare metal disaster recovery restores all programs, documents and settings. GPL open source.
I once used macrium rescue media in Linux which is no longer an option but we have some very good Imaging and Cloning software.
1. Foxclone...https://foxclone.org/
Thanks for all the suggestions. This newbie tried most of them and found Rescuezilla most reliable and easy. Plus I like its ability to compress the image. Thanks Condobloke ... Jerry