I take for granted that OS can get to be as high as 8gb even if it goes up to 16 gb then that's the ONLY part of the boot disk I want to backup...
DD option is not doing that and have no clue why not
Did you read what as been said:
YOUR ROOT PARTITION IS 231.9G
DD will always make a clone of PARTITION or DISK (if DD FULL)
We are trying to figure out why the DD option is not doing what it is meant to do
DD is doing what it's meant to do: make a copy of the PARTITION or DISK.
What you want is to create a image from the OS system DATA (which will probably be less than 8Gb) on the PARTITION.
DD won't be able to do that.
You will need to look for fsarchiver. This will only "clone" the DATA that lives on a PARTITION.
But be sure to learn HOW TO RESTORE IT.
It's not a simple "copy back to the partition" way of restoring.