How to save the contents of a file system on to a file

Question

What is the best practice to save and retrieve a file system in UNIX. Say I have a filesystem at /mnt/vin, my requirement is to save the contents to a file. How to do this?

Answer 1

If you want to backup the complete FS(data and metadata), mostly commonly use dd if=/path/do/dev of=/path/to/file bs=1024