HD Install :: to dd or not to dd

well, i have finally got to a place where i am happy with my hdd install. i know u all think i'm mad not going for a frugal install, but i just want to turn on the machine and have all of my apps installed as i like them.

any hoo, there are enough posts dealing with the pro's and con's of frugal, but i have a hdd install related question.

does anyone have any strong opinions on whether it is best to use th "dd if=* of=*" command to take an image of my shiny new hd install of dsl, or whether it is best to go the "g4l" or some similar prog. route.

i will be imaging my only partition on my only disk (apart from swap partition) to a usb external hdd. it will be no bigger than 2.9G uncompressed and the usb drive is working well in my current dsl setup.

When I ran a harddrive install I had 2 identically sized partitions. When I got my hdd install how I liked it, I booted into runlevel 2 and copied the harddrive install to the extra partition using dd. Then when I screwed up my install, I could just boot back to run level 2 and dd the opposite direction.
This, of course, took twice the amount of space on the computer, but helped me learn quite a bit about dsl.

original here.