To avoid mistakes I always do “lsblk” (on Linux) or “diskutil list” (on macOS) or “gpart show” (on FreeBSD) and carefully read the output before I do the dd to

To avoid mistakes I always do “lsblk” (on Linux) or “diskutil list” (on macOS) or “gpart show” (on FreeBSD) and carefully read the output before I do the dd to something. Usually on Linux I only use /dev/disk/by-id/foo in scripts and config files. But using it when doing routine stuff with dd is a pretty good idea too. It’s too bad that macOS and FreeBSD hasn’t anything similar to my knowledge. And since I use both of these operating systems so much, and so often for things involving dd, I think in my case I don’t gain much from doing by-id for dd on Linux unfortunately.