Restore Failure: not enough space on /dev/disk2s2 to restore

Question

New MacBook Pro with Lion all up to date.  Have 9 partitions (plus the two hidden ones).  Operating system is on one with 125GB.  82.72GB are used and 42.28GB are available (says disk utility).  I want to "restore" to an external hard drive.  I don't care if that partition is bootable or not.  It is 124.48 GB and 124.26GB are free.  When I try to do the restore, I get the message in the subject above.
Background.  I've been doing exactly this for 8 years on my two previous macbooks.  It used to be that you could do this with the computer running, but it didn't always work.  Now you have to unmount the partition to restore it, which seems more likely to work.  In other words, you have to restart and go into recovery mode.  Irritating, but if it worked better it would be worth it.  (Only have to do this for the operating system partition.  Easy to backup all the others and that's been done.  However, I would really like to back up the operating system partition.)  I have always found this an easy operation.  You could copy your computer onto an external drive, replace the computer's hard drive and copy things back, all using restore in disk utility.  Obviously, if I can't copy the partition off to somewhere else, I'm not going to be able to copy it back if I ever need to. 
It is true that the OS partition just points to /.  Is it possible that restore wants to carry along all the other partitions as well and that's why there isn't enough space?  If so, this is a bug, since OS has always pointed to / and there has never been a problem before. 
I am moderately paranoid because I have lost enough hard drives in my life.  I do have time machine but I read that if you backup from it, it wipes out your recovery partition.  I'd like to have both my time machine and my restore copies. 
I'm thinking of packing up the external hard drive and the computer and making an appointment at the apple store.  Help very much appreciated.

Answer 1

W Stephen Wilson wrote:
Disk utility seems to be broken now, at least from my point of view.
Disk Utility's restore function never was quite good to begin with, very dumb.
You'll like Carbon Copy Cloner, it's the best, and it's smart.
Especially the huge control it gives and the fact that you can update the clones and even save states between the updates as backups.
Best of all it will copy EFI and Recovery and "fit" to upgrade to larger or smaller partitions if the data will allow it. The scheduling ability is a nice feature too.
I use it for auto-updating and/or reminding me to update clone on another partition on the boot drive and external drives every few days or weeks or so, depending upon my needs. So it's nice for the fact that I can scheduale many clones on seperate hardware.
All my clones are option key bootable, plus the files can be accessed directly by any platform that can read the HFS+ format, I'm not locked into using or restoring only to another Mac.
Freedom is good, TimeMachine is the absolute purist evil as a backup system. (just kidding, it's ok for some )
BTW, if you want your data to be a lot more reliable on hard drives, you should perhaps read this.
Reducing bad sectors effect on hard drives