Backup from Linux

OK, I'm sick of messing with backup utilities seeing the right drives thanks to me having SCSI, ATA & SATA on this sysytem.

So, would a good way of backup up a drive be to do the following:

dd if="/dev/hda" of="/wherever the hell I want"

And the restore process would be similar no doubt. BTW this if for a windows partition, but I have Linux on this rig also (sometimes.)

Would it work, or am I either missing the concept of dd, or trying to do too much with it?

someone who knows more than me suggests it would work but test using a floppy -> file backup first