I think this has a bit of bad advice for using cp or shell redirection to read / write to raw block devices but dd isn't necessarily the best either. Personally

I think this has a bit of bad advice for using cp or shell redirection to read / write to raw block devices but dd isn't necessarily the best either. Personally any time I'm trying to image some hard drive, damaged or otherwise, I'll just about always jump straight to ddrescue (not dd_rescue). It's similar to dd, surprise surprise, but it keeps a log of which parts of the input and output have been copied / had errors / skipped. Nothing is more annoying than waiting an hour for some large copy to make progress and then run into an error or get interrupted for whatever reason. Using ddrescue because it keeps a log of the status of the operation you can resume it with the same command and it will pick back up right where it left of instead of having to start all over. It's also intelligent enough to not fail the first time and skip over some bad region of the disk on error and come back and reattempt it using various strategies once it's already copied the low hanging fruit. There's very little reason not to use it, even if it's just to get a nice progress view instead of just the current amount of data copied.