That’s a restore not a backup. I’m not actually defending dd. It’s bonkers how long it was considered acceptable to offer that as a solution for anything except zeroing out a disk. I shed a single proverbial tear and contemplated the sad state of technology every time I used it, and felt dirty for having done so.

It is The Worst.

It’s just the most egregious example. The difference in excess argument processing between commands is rather broad example. Is the last arg special or the first one? Grep and tar are in the majority, but cp works differently. They only make sense if you think of the power user.

What I meant was that using dd to take format/backup disks is just way too dangerous for human beings. The prospect of losing your precious data even once in your lifetime is too expensive a cost for the questionable benefit of feeling cool about doing backups by running a command on the terminal. Just use a gui tool for writing to physical disks. The additional visual feedback that a gui can provide is absolutely essential for human beings performing such a dangerous operation.