Quote Originally Posted by gowator
Theoretcially YES!
But personally I think you did it the safest way! (I would have probably done the same)
dd:ing a mounted filesystem will result in the copy also being in the mounted state, which means it might be inconsistent and it will be "dirty" the next time it is mounted. Usually things can still be fixed automatically but there are no guarantees. This is less of a problem with logging filesystems like ext3 or reiserfs, whenever you are dd:ing an ext2 filesystem it is important that it is not mounted.