Backup & Recovery (Rsync/Tar/Dd)

Stop dd from leaving you guessing in the dark

🧩 The Challenge

You are cloning a massive drive with dd and it feels like the terminal just hung, leaving you to wonder if it is actually writing data or if the drive controller gave up on life. I have spent way too many nervous afternoons staring at a blinking cursor, terrified to pull the plug.

💡 The Fix

Just send a signal to the process and it will spit out a status report without you having to restart the whole transfer. It is a lifesaver when you are staring at a multi-terabyte image and need a sanity check.

kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$)

⚙️ Why It Works

Sending the USR1 signal to dd forces it to report the current progress, total bytes written, and transfer speed directly to stderr. Because standard dd doesn’t output anything by default, this is the only way to know if your progress bar is stuck or just slow.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Alias this to something like ‘ddstat’ so you don’t have to look up the signal number when you are panicking.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 10/19/2026