shamelessly stolen from nixCraft on mastodon
You used something called disk destroyer, and you just found out why
Disk Duplicator is a destroyer? Man, I used to image so many drives with DD back in my helpdesk days…
dddoes not stand for “disk duplicator”. That’s a modern backronymization that doesn’t reflect the original general usage of the command which is to “convert and copy”. Efficiently (with respect to I/O) copying raw data is only one of its intended purposes; it also converts text encodings.
Another advantage of having a NVMe SSD, hard to confuse /dev/nvme0n1p2 with /dev/sda1
I just make use of my paranoia, so I triple and quadruple check. Then get a coffee and quadruple check again. Never messed up once
It’s even easier to prevent confusion if you use /dev/disk/by-id/ id’s, it only took a few times of overwriting the wrong disk to figure that out.
How can I figure out which direct device is associated with a specific id?
Not sure if it is equal on all distros but on every one I have used it’s a readable string of muliple components. One of them is “usb” for a usb mass storage, so if it is the only one you have connected to your computer it is very obvious. For like sata disks it has the manufacturer and serial on it so you can match what drive it is you want to write to. Also, the name is pretty unique (on your sysytem at least, globally I don’t know), so even if you swap hardware around, you cannot write to the wrong storage if you got the right name. Like “sdb” can be reassigned, but the id is an id.
ˋblkidˋ or take a look around /dev, devices are symlinked to their various attributes.
Your USB is probably named ‘/’ or ‘~’ so give that a go.
Anyone who hits enter on a dd command without triple-checking it gets exactly what they deserve.
Fun fact: you can use
cat image.iso > /dev/deviceand it (should) just works.Yay, more ways to (accidentally) destroy my data!
