[PLUG] Copying all partitions of a drive to single partition/directory?

[Richard Owlett]

I wish to do fresh Debian installs to three machines {including 
repartitioning drives of each machine}. Each drive is nominally 250GB. I 
have purchased a USB connected 1TB drive to be the target.

I like the ease of use of Clonezilla-live. But it intrinsically wipes 
the target drive completely. Compressing the output would be nice.

TIA