Backing up a stand alone system to a usb drive with rsync

[Chris]

I have a stand alone system with two drives / and /home on one and /var
on the the other. I'd like to backup the complete system to a usb drive.
I've tried dd however since it copies over everything, even empty space
it didn't seem very practical since for instance root only has 10GiB out
of 70 used. Would rsync be a suitable application to use for this or
will it only work over a network?

Thank you for any information

-- 
Chris
KeyID 0xE372A7DA98E6705C

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