The best way to manage environment variables: don’t use environment variables.

Cool, but what is Odin? If there’s no Wikipedia article about something, it doesn’t exist.

It’s a bad practice to log in as root even for administrative tasks. You need to run numerous commands, some of hem can be potentially dangerous while not requiring root privileges. So normally you have an admin user in the sudo/wheel group and need to login to this account. Also, this adds some protection in case your key has leaked.

Camel book is the best technical book I ever read. It’s unlikely that you’ll program Perl, but it’s really fun to read.

The Practice of Programming is the must.

Your idea is correct, but I don’t know how to do this in Wndows (while this is pretty simple in linux). However I want to warn you that if the partition that you are dumping is used by the OS, the resulting image will most likely be corrupted. Better use a linux live system and ensure that the partition is not mounted.