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One thing I'll often use dd for is recovering data from a failing drive. Can head ignore read errors? dd can. As far as I'm concerned, dd is lower-level than m
by colemannugent 10y ago
One thing I'll often use dd for is recovering data from a failing drive. Can head ignore read errors? dd can.
As far as I'm concerned, dd is lower-level than most of the other utilities and provides more control over what's happening.
The author does have a point that the syntax is strange though.
- simcop2387 10y agoI use gnu ddrescue for this for its ability to log and retry failed areas. Can make recovery or verifying data easier
- ue_ 10y ago>One thing I'll often use dd for is recovering data from a failing drive. Funnily enough, I ended up using it to accidentally name the wrong drive in the argument, and lost years of photos, music, video etc. though I suppose I can't blame dd for that :)
- jackyinger 10y agoDon't drink and dd. Spoken from experience.
- CPLX 10y agoI think there's a rule that you're not really qualified to discuss command line tools in public until you've used dd to inadvertently eradicate an entire partition.
- keithpeter 10y agoPersonally, I'd add the use of a trailing full-stop in an rsync command in the wrong directory (e.g. in /home/user) as an alternative qualification to your rule. I now use full paths for destination as well as source.
- Freaky 10y agodd is awful and error-prone for this sort of use. Use noerror, but forget sync? Corrupt output file if there is an error. Use a bigger bs so it's not slow as treacle? A single faulty sector blows away a whole bs of data, and your output image may get unwanted padding appended to the end. Recoverable error? dd's not going to retry. Use ddrescue or FreeBSD's recoverdisk(1). They're faster, they're safer, they're more effective, and they're easier to use.
- sillysaurus3 10y agoddrescue is excellent.
- ianai 10y agoddrescue is so good that that particular example feels a little strawman-ish
- bigbugbag 10y agoGNU ddrescue[1] and not dd_rescue[2]. I'm adding this precision because depending on the linux distros dd_rescue package name may be ddrescue and GNU ddrescue package name may be gddrescue. [1]: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html [2]: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/ http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/
- FeepingCreature 10y agoPersonally I prefer safecopy.
- bigbugbag 10y agoI thought dd could be used for this purpose and ended up with a dead drive and an unusable partial image. Now I know better and use GNU ddrescue.