Show Progress Bar During dd Copy

There are a number of ways of showing the progress of a dd copy. The easiest is sending the USER1 signal to the dd process, like:

dd if=FILE1 of=FILE2
pkill -USER1 dd

But that only gives a current status – eg 12345678 bytes transferred (11.77MB) … [8.56MB/s]. Not that helpful if you want an ongoing update. You can make it periodic by using the watch command:

watch -n 10 pkill -USR1 dd

Still not perfect. If you want a progress bar, ETA and so forth, you’re best off using pv, a utility that measures the speed of a file through a pipe. If you don’t know what that means, I’d recommend reading up on the UNIX philosophy and pipes, but basically it means you can tell what dd is doing. Use it like so:

pv FILE1 | dd of=FILE2

For my use, backing up a 500GB hard drive that I use with a NAS (an NSLU2 I’ve probably mentioned before), I used the following command:

sudo pv /dev/sde3 |dd of=~/tera/nslu2.img

/dev/de3 is the data partition on the drive
~/tera/nslu2.img is the image file I want written to a terabyte-sized hard drive, mounted at ~/tera/.

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As a post-script, the reason I’m backing this drive up is my nslu2 is failing weirdly. It was running without a hitch for years, then it without apparent warning dismounted the drive in slot1 and reverted to running from flash. I only figured that out as I had to log in with an old password. Trying to start it up results in it beeping once every minute or so, with the ready status lamp flashing orange. It seems to go through a loop. I thought it was a temporary glitch, as when I plugged the drive into my desktop to check the thing was intact the partitions showed up, then when I plugged it back into the nslu2 and turned it on it worked fine.

That was 3 nights ago. This evening it’s done the same thing, except repeating the steps didn’t sort it out. Running the drive through some brief SMART diagnostics and a partition check shows up no problems, so I’m inclined to believe the problem lies in the nslu2. I’ll post again if I can sort it, but at this stage I think a re-flashing is in order. Only problem is I can’t remember what firmware I flashed onto the nslu2 in the first place. D’oh!