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I have a huge disk image backed up using dd. I need to restore the disk image but dd is very silent.

How can I monitor its progress?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Aug 22 '10 at 22:00

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

Execute the following command in the second terminal:

kill -USR1 nnn

where nnn is the PID of the running dd process.

dd will print its I/O statistics to the standard error.

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Check the man page for dd -- in at least some versions, you need to send it SIGINFO, not SIGUSR1. – Gordon Davisson Aug 23 '10 at 0:19
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PV should work:

dd if=huge_disk | pv -rb >/dev/sd_restore
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Great idea. Unfortunately, I already started restoring :( – Omar Aug 22 '10 at 19:55
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You can make the transfer happen faster by increasing the default block size for the transfer:

dd if=/sda bs=1M | pv -rb >/dev/sdb

Remember to only use this with both drives unmounted, or you could end up with a broken filesystem on the destination drive if either drive is written to during the transfer.

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