Backup & Recovery (Rsync/Tar/Dd)

Stop dd from leaving you guessing about your backup progress

🧩 The Challenge

You trigger a massive dd dump of a failing disk to an image file and then sit there staring at a blinking cursor for three hours. There is no worse feeling than not knowing if the process is actually doing work or if the drive finally gave up the ghost ten minutes in.

💡 The Fix

Send a signal to the process to force it to dump its current progress to the terminal without killing the job. It turns a mystery box into a status bar you can actually monitor.

kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$)

⚙️ Why It Works

By sending the USR1 signal, you are telling the dd process to report how many blocks it has copied so far and the current throughput. It handles the interrupt, prints the stats to stderr, and then gets back to business like nothing happened.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Toss an alias in your bashrc that just runs the kill command, because you will absolutely forget the signal number when you are stressed during a real recovery.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 7/27/2026