DD command is very help to Copy files, converting and formatting according to the operands. Also helpful for take backup files with different formats.  

This post describe about  how to copy of a hard disk to the local system remotely,  For example two types of backup run from remote system and run from local system,


Run from remote computer


# dd if=/mnt/thelinuxfaq/thelinuxfaq.img |  ssh root@192.168.4.48 "dd of=/dev/mmcblk0" bs=1M

7634944+0 records in
7634944+0 records out
0+27605 records in
0+27605 records out
433468120 bytes (433 MB) copied, 3607.67 s, 120 kB/s

Run from local computer  

# ssh root@192.168.4.48 "dd if=/dev/mmcblk0" | dd of=/mnt/thelinuxfaq/thelinuxfaq.img bs=1M

7634944+0 records in
7634944+0 records out
0+27605 records in
0+27605 records out
433468120 bytes (433 MB) copied, 2907.67 s, 220 kB/s