[hinkley]

I get a little offended by people who think stackoverflow is a character flaw. I go there because it will tell me things like if you get the arguments to ‘dd’ wrong you’ll zero out the drive you were trying to back up. That the function breaks if you pass in null for the second parameter. Or that it simply doesn’t work properly.

[robocat]

I used the if= and of= command line parameters last time I used dd: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/dd.1.html

[alex_smart]

I think that using dd is a character flaw.

[davegauer]

To expand on this, people needlessly cargo-cult arcane dd commands, but on many (most?) systems, "cp foo.iso /dev/sdb" will do the same thing, but with possibly even better performance!

[hinkley]

That’s a restore not a backup. I’m not actually defending dd. It’s bonkers how long it was considered acceptable to offer that as a solution for anything except zeroing out a disk. I shed a single proverbial tear and contemplated the sad state of technology every time I used it, and felt dirty for having done so.

It is The Worst.

It’s just the most egregious example. The difference in excess argument processing between commands is rather broad example. Is the last arg special or the first one? Grep and tar are in the majority, but cp works differently. They only make sense if you think of the power user.

[alex_smart]

What I meant was that using dd to take format/backup disks is just way too dangerous for human beings. The prospect of losing your precious data even once in your lifetime is too expensive a cost for the questionable benefit of feeling cool about doing backups by running a command on the terminal. Just use a gui tool for writing to physical disks. The additional visual feedback that a gui can provide is absolutely essential for human beings performing such a dangerous operation.

[hinkley]

At this point recommending dd really is kind of telling the other person to go fuck themselves. It doesn't even follow the arg format of every other unix command. I had to double check to see if anyone fixed that in the interim. Nope, still a=b syntax, rather than -i device1 -o device2.

That really should be a giant clue that it shouldn't be used by anyone, for any reason. "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."

[drewzero1]

What would you recommend as an alternative for disk imaging in Linux? I'm in the process of migrating a herd of PCs from HDDs to SSDs and would appreciate suggestions.