That said I remember a roommate erasing it's Windows "C:" drive using Ghost (that is "Ghost" before Norton bought it). No later than yesterday I copied my wife

That said I remember a roommate erasing it's Windows "C:" drive using Ghost (that is "Ghost" before Norton bought it). No later than yesterday I copied my wife's entire (Windows 8.1) HDD to an SSD using the free (GUI) version of "Macrium Reflect". I'm pretty sure you can make the exact same mistake: copying destination unto source instead of the contratry. I used a Windows software and not DD for it was a Windows computer and I didn't feel like booting a live Linux CD to do the dump but under Linux, I always use dd. Is it really that hard to learn that in dd the 'i' in "if" means "input" and that the 'o' in "of" means "output"? The problem with "making things simple using a GUI" is that you typically totally lose the ability to do not just advanced things but even "average" things. For example for read-only media I always write the checksum on the media itself, using a sharpie. That way I can easily verify that my disk (or the copy) is ok doing a dd and piping into sha256sum (there are some gotchas to keep in mind but it works fine when you know how to do it). Like, say, a Debian install ISO. I like to have these on read-only medium and make sure the checksum matches the official one (so I prefer a write-once / read-only DVD than a read/write memory stick). How do you that with the GUI? Piping into a cryptographic hash? I can understand that people prefer GUI over command line for many things but I think that people imaging entire disks are at least power users and can learn the difference between "input" and "output". Heck, maybe it's even doing them a service to teach them to use the CLI. Maybe it's the opportunity to teach them about piping, about cryptographic hashes, etc. And once again: you can totally screw up with a GUI too. I don't mean it in a bad way at all but... Linux on the desktop (which I use since 20 years) ain't exactly enjoying a huge market share compared to Windows or OS X and I think that's fine. If a Linux user cannot or isn't willing to learn dd, maybe that user is better served by Windows or OS X. And really: I don't mean it in a bad way. I don't think Linux has to "win" the Desktop war. I don't think it's wrong not to use Linux. But I do think it's wrong to believe users willing to learn Linux cannot learn the difference between input and ouptut. Also a strong case can be made that someone for whom it's a "disaster" to overwrite it's main drive is one hard disk failure away from disaster anyway. I'm for educating users, not baby-feeding them with tools that are going to keep them in the dark and reinforce their bad practices (like not doing proper backups and hence being "one hard drive failure" away from disaster).