When creating full images from one of my rootdisks …
dd if=/dev/sda | bzip2 >/opt/backup/sda.img.bzip2
… i noticed the backups were growing, but the amount of data on the device was not.
Since dd is a full blocklevel- and not a filebased backup, there must be some free space containing old bits and bytes.
The sfill utility can overwrite the freespace with zeroes, giving me better compressed images.
sfill -f -l -l -z /mnt/mountpoint